Linguistics

A few years back, I wasted time on Duolingo trying to learn Spanish. I no longer do that and you shouldn’t. Here’s why it’s not effective and better alternatives.

Every resource that I came across tries to teach Spanish to English speakers. Those who already know Hindi/Devanagari have certain advantages. Both in terms of producing the correct Spanish pronunciation as well as being able to read/speak the Spanish language. Like Hindi, Spanish is much more phonetic and rule-based than English.

About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes.

Indic-origin names should not use “v”, the sound is entirely non-existent in Indic-origin languages.

Most native Hindi speakers like me are familiar with Punjabi vocabulary through Punjabi music. Out of curiosity, I decided to spend some time learning Gurmukhi. I was a bit taken aback by the fact that most articles and videos were aimed at teaching Punjabi (Gurmukhi) to English speakers. However, it is much easier to map Punjabi (Gurmukhi) to Hindi (Devanagari) letters for a native Hindi speaker, as almost all Gurmukhi letters map really well to their Devanagari counterparts. Here are my notes.