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“The ‘Best’ is the enemy of the ‘Good’.” It is an expression that is commonly used among my coworkers and friends. The point is that sometimes in trying to find the “Best” solution we overlook or ignore things that are “good”. The “Best” may take too long. Sometimes “good enough” is “good enough”.

So remember a week ago I posted a message called “Where is my Hindi lesson?“. In that message I talked about a set of new Hindi lessons that would be of a much higher and consistent quality than we had so far. I am still planning to do that. But the more I get into it, the more I realize it will take a lot of time to get right. It is something I want to take my time to get right. Something that I want to be able to get a lot of people to help with and ensure that they are as effective as they could be. This all will take a lot of time. Which causes me a problem, I could either wait and get these “best” Hindi lessons done and not publish anything while they are being prepared. Or I could rush them and publish them earlier. Or I could publish some lessons that are easy to produce, but are still good. In the mean time I can be working on these “best” lessons at my leisure.

Luckily, I think I have a solution… My brother-in-law recently went to India. And I think I have one of the best brother-in-laws you can hope for, because he was thoughtful enough to get an assortment of basic Hindi books for use on this program. I now have several copies of a variety of basic Hindi books. And at the rate of 5-10 minutes per episode, it will probably provide at least 6 months of lessons.

So, my plan now is to work diligently and consistently on producing the “best” Hindi lessons that I had mentioned a week ago, but to keep up the daily episodes using these books. I will also be making these books available as a gift to those that help support the site with a donation of $25 or more.

$5 $10 $25 $50 $100 $150 $200 $250

The first book that we will do is the Hindi Primer (जीवनदीप राष्टभाषा प्रवेशिका). Here is a picture of it. It is only 40 pages long and contains just a few words/sentences per page. It has a lot of pictures and places to practice writing.

Here are some pictures of the inside:

and this is the page for today’s recording:

We will be recording the lessons related to the book on CD and will send the book and CD(s) together. That way you can just take the CD and play it while looking at the book. In some cases, we will try to add extra exercises and examples to the contents in the book.

I only have 22 copies of this book. (I plan to keep one for myself, which means that 21 copies are available). If you are interested in one, then you should make arrangements to get it soon. I think they will go quickly because we have a lot more people on our mailing list now (about 4 times as many as when we started the Kid’s Primer), it is a Hindi book to teach Hindi (as oppose to a Hindi book to teach English), and we will be giving the CDs with the book. Anyway, if you are interested, I recommending making a donation today to ensure you get a book…

Well, on with today’s lesson.

	paath (the last sound ठ is a “retroflexive” sound meaning that the tongue should be put at the top of the top of the mouth. Also, it is aspirate so add a “puff” of air as you say it.)	पाठ means “chapter”	पाठ १ means “chapter 1″
	The Hindi numeral for “1″ spelled as “एक” and pronounced as “ek”	1
	In the transliteration scheme that we are using, we would write “kap”, but this is misleading, because it is pronounced just like “cup”.	cup
	ghar	house
	phal	fruit
	dekho	[you] see	देखो is the तुम (”tum” you informal)form of देखना (dekhnaa) which means “to see”
	aur (sounds just like “or” to me, but there is a little difference…Listen closely)	and
	likho	[you] write	just like देखो, लिखो is the तुम (”tum” ‘you’ informal) version of the verb लिखना (likhnaa) which means “to write”
	shabdon	words
	ko	preposition that usually means “to”.	In the sentence “शब्दों को लिखो” it translates into “write the words” There is no word in the English sentence that is related to को and incidentally, there is no word in the Hindi sentence that is related to “the”…

There are ways that you could help yourself and others learn Hindi. You can take the above words and create a “study set” on a flashcard site like http://www.flashcardexchange.com, http://www.flashcardmachine.com, or a similar site. Then you can leave a link in the comments on ISpeakHindi.com to the flash card set so others can study.

You can also create a sample sentence using the words above and leave that in a comment. (And if you are good at Hindi, then you might want to come by the site to check the comments to see that people’s sample sentences are correct and add comments.)

Remember study a little Hindi each and everyday. Eventually you will get to where you want to go.

See you tomorrow!