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So the desire to learn Urdu has come upon me recently. Does anyone have any suggestions? I can google "learn urdu" pretty easily, so mostly I'm wondering if anyone here has tried to learn it and has some personal anecdotes that might help get me on my way.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Well, it started as a ploy to make myself more marketable as a historian. I decided to take as one of my minor fields South Asia. But the more I study it, the more I love it. So, I would really like to be able to read source documents, and also I do plan on spending at least a bit of time over there, so I would like to be able to speak the language. I know, English is probably just as widely spoken, but call it a matter of principle. Also, I'm up for a challenge.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Hmmmm. I asked because there are many more resources available for learning Hindi than for learning Urdu, and Hindi is much more useful in modern India than Urdu is. Urdu would be useful if you're interested specifically in Muslim issues, or if your interest of the subcontinent is with Pakistan, not India. If you're interested in the Islamic empires (like the Mughal time period) then Urdu would be of use, but I think most formal writing would be in Persian.
Anyways, if you're interested in learning Hindi, I have a TON of resources to point you towards, since I've been working on & off on the language for the past couple of years. If your interest remains in Urdu, I suggest you check out this reference site to find resources - it has the most comprehensive lists for any of the South Asian languages I've tried to look up.
Given the similarities in the sounds used in both Hindi & Urdu, I'd suggest you first work on mastering the script, rather than sticking with a sub-par transliteration. That's what I did with Hindi, and I think it helped a lot. There are a number of sounds differentiated as different letters in Urdu/Hindi that are not distinguished in English - specifically, there are about 8 d/t sounds that are tough to distinguish with an English ear. Learning the script will require you to learn to distinguish them, which will make it much, much easier to learn and reproduce vocabulary. Whenever my husband teaches me a new word, I can ask him to spell it in Hindi script out-loud, and then I know exactly how I ought to be saying it, even if I couldn't quite make out the pronunciation when he said it.
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
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