Later on this page, I explain why I developed some of the tools on this
site, but for those who prefer to see something rather than to read a
description of it, the following list summarizes the tools and provides their
links:
During preparation for language exams in my doctoral work, I developed tools
for use both in learning the language and taking the exams. For the French
exam, the tool consists of:
Preparing for the Hindi exam, I attempted to follow a strategy similar to that
that I followed for the French exam. Doing so, however, quickly made obvious
some important differences between projects which seek to translate French
texts into English and those that seek a simliar goal with Hindi texts.
Among the differences, there were, of course, the relatively fewer number of
cognates, not to mention the different alphabet. More troublingly, I found the
far fewer resources available to a non-Hindi speaker a daunting obstacle.
One of the most troubling issues was my inability to locate an exhaustive
Hindi dictionary. In the end, I used six dictionaries for the exam, but also
relied heavily on a
Hindi vocabulary which
I compiled for translation purposes. Like the
French vocabulary described above, this
list of words included those words that occurred most frequently in my
translation work. Unlike the
French vocabulary, however, I also
included words that did not appear in any of the six dictionaries, the
defintions of which I obtained from my tutor, from an internet search, or on
occassion a lucky guess. Finally, since Hindi words are often compounded,
I included in the vocabulary, the affixes that I had discovered in my
work.
Towards the end of my preparation, I did a quick and dirty
statistical analysis
of my work to determine which of the six dictionaries had proven be the most
useful. Somewhat surprisingly, I found that the
Allied Chambers Transliteral
Hindi Dictionary had outperformed the other five by quite a margin.
Of course, to develop this vocabulary required learning not only to read and
write the Devnagri script but lso to type it on a standard computer keyboard.
In support of this effort I developed
tables
in which I mapped the Qwerty keyboard to the Hindi alphabet.
As do many languages, Hindi relies heavily on affixes (prefixes and suffixes)
to modify the meaning of a word, and thus my set of tools includes several
tables
related to prefixes and suffixes as well as affixes that appear within a word.
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