Excellent!, February 3, 2001

This book offers a clear and complete introduction to the Devanagari script with numerous reading and writing exercises. After some brief remarks on the Devanagari syllabary's history and significance the author starts off explaining every letter and signs of the script. He does it indicating the stroke sequence and giving handwritten examples of every character. A very brief chapter teaches the reader some basic sentences and commands. The book is rounded off by six specimens of native speakers' handwriting and a short glossary at the end.

A great companion to the Teach Yourself Hindi Set, April 12, 2004

I bought this together with the Teach Yourself Hindi book/CD set, also from Rupert Snell, and they make a great combo. Learning devanagari was always the part of learning Hindi I was least looking forward to, but the book is so well put together that it makes the challenge very interesting. Right from its fascinating introduction, dealing with the hisory, structure and philosophy of the script, it helps build an eagerness to master devanagari, essential to really mastering the language. I can't think of a reason not to buyn this book, especially in tandem with the Teach Yourself CD set.

Thorough and effective, but..., August 13, 2003

I have tried to teach myself Hindi, and there is no denying that the key to learning the language and its pronunciation is learning the script. This book is methodical, thorough, and very effective. I used it at the beginning while working with more comprehensive books, and I learned the writing system very fast with its help. This in turn made studying with the other books that much more valuable.

However, once done with the book I actually didn't have to go back to it., which is a good thing, because the physical quality of this book is appalling. It is so poorly bound that during my very first attempt to open and copy from it, it came apart immediately, and only lots of scotch tape kept it from disintegrating entirely before I was done with it. This is unacceptable for the price!

An OK book...., November 26, 2002
Reviewer: A reader
This book does give some background on the Hindi language, but what I don't like is WHY would the author teach archaeic words that are no longer used? This is not only confusing but he fails to give the updated version of the word. Also, when merging consanants, the author does not explain the certain letter is in fact a merge of 2 letters. This book basically jumps around and did not really help much but confuse the reader. The author should start with the alphabet, then vowels, then slowly show the reader how to make words out of these.....

He does not even explain how a sentence is composed in which order example, noun, verb, etc.....these basics are taught in all other language books.

Do NOT buy this book.

The Fastest Way to Learn Devanagari, i.e. Hindi writing, July 29, 2002

I first made my acquaintance with this book at my local library a year ago. I was originally planning to learn Urdu and its Perso-Arabic script, but the beauty (and comparable simplicity) of Devanagari made me change my mind. I eventually bought this book (just last month) and am very happy to say that with just 5 hours of combined practice (over a 2 week interval) I can easily write in Devanagari! For a grapho-maniac like me, realizing that I can write in a completely alien script is more than enough encouragement to stick with actually learning the spoken language. Do yourself a favor: if you want to learn Hindi (and I recommend Snell's Teach Yourself Hindi course for that) you really NEED this book. Except no substitutes.

Devangari asan hai!, January 4, 2002

This book is an excellent into the language of Hindi, I picked this book mainly in the interest of looking at it, and found the writting system was fascinating enough to buy the book. Once you get past the background chapters about the language the book gets you directly into writting characters, and doing excersises. In about a week I was able to write all the consants and vowels, and understand basic 'conjuncts', which are probubly the hardest thing about the writting. Conjuncts are basically two consanants put together. The next chapters skim the surface of grammer and basic sentences. The end has 5 appendices giving you writting examples that would make you scratch your head in confusion for awhile, Numbers, Answers and even additional practice.

The book is also full of numerous signs that have things written in Hindi in them, these make learning the different fonts much easier and get you out of looking for the English letters in some of them.

My one complaint is the way this book doesn't explain the sounds to well, and the writting examples in the end are horrible! I write bad in english but it seems these people had burned their palms before trying to write.