Hm. I joined up, did some poking around, and started the lessons. I'm, er, not convinced. I'll hold out for the possibility that the connections with real live other people might make it worth it, but...
(There was no devanagari throughout most of lesson one, and the transliterations used were frankly bizarre in some cases - maybe they're traditional, but it's very hard to see where they're coming from. वह, for instance, was written as 'Woh," even while the recorded voices were saying something closer to 'veheh.' The last part of the lesson was to read sample sentence and be recorded, and A: suddenly it was all in devanagari, with no transliterations in sight, and B: when I arduously worked out each word, they'd gotten the wrong ones half the time - they used दुबली, when the vocabulary word the lesson had taught had been "patli," नाटी when the transliteration had been 'thigna', which I can't even find in the dictionary. Etc..) I'm not telling you to go, 'You pointed me at a crummy site!', just to let you know that there seem to be some...issues.
I like what they're trying to do, with the whole system of having other people review your exercises and so forth. I suspect that this is a product of having acceded to demand to produce Hindi when the only way they could do so was with machine translations and no one to proof it before they put it up. Or maybe I, in my ultimately novice state, am misunderstanding the situation completely. That's definitely a possibility.
Tp be fair I know nothing about Hindi, and havn't tried to use Livemocha to start learning a language yet. The interaction is pretty cool later on, and you can rapidly find many msn buddies to practice with, maybe it's not so good for beginners.
वह should be pronounced "woh." Anyone who was saying "veheh" was either wrong or using something very regional. I've never heard anyone say it like that--just woh or voh. I have no idea why it's pronounced like that, though.
I also signed up for the site, and got a bit, err, confused as well. But I guess it might be good to practice?
Btw, there was in fact Devanagari troughout the rest of the lesson, when learning the vocabulary you could click on a little button (below the 'translate'-button) to show it in Devanagari.
Btw, there was in fact Devanagari troughout the rest of the lesson, when learning the vocabulary you could click on a little button (below the 'translate'-button) to show it in Devanagari.
Only on the reading part. Once you get to 'review' and 'magnet,' that option disappears. (That's why I said 'most of.')
And...I don't think I want to practice wrong. If I'm imitating voices that are pronouncing so simple a word completely wrong, and trying to match learned vocabulary with the script for completely different words, I'm not convinced I'm going to benefit as a learner.
I'm debating whether just to cancel my membership and tell them why. I'm really not far enough along to benefit from a language exchange partner, which is something I see the site as actually being good for. And I suspect it does better for some other languages than it seems to be doing for Hindi.
(There was no devanagari throughout most of lesson one, and the transliterations used were frankly bizarre in some cases - maybe they're traditional, but it's very hard to see where they're coming from. वह, for instance, was written as 'Woh," even while the recorded voices were saying something closer to 'veheh.' The last part of the lesson was to read sample sentence and be recorded, and A: suddenly it was all in devanagari, with no transliterations in sight, and B: when I arduously worked out each word, they'd gotten the wrong ones half the time - they used दुबली, when the vocabulary word the lesson had taught had been "patli," नाटी when the transliteration had been 'thigna', which I can't even find in the dictionary. Etc..) I'm not telling you to go, 'You pointed me at a crummy site!', just to let you know that there seem to be some...issues.
I like what they're trying to do, with the whole system of having other people review your exercises and so forth. I suspect that this is a product of having acceded to demand to produce Hindi when the only way they could do so was with machine translations and no one to proof it before they put it up. Or maybe I, in my ultimately novice state, am misunderstanding the situation completely. That's definitely a possibility.
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Btw, there was in fact Devanagari troughout the rest of the lesson, when learning the vocabulary you could click on a little button (below the 'translate'-button) to show it in Devanagari.
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Only on the reading part. Once you get to 'review' and 'magnet,' that option disappears. (That's why I said 'most of.')
And...I don't think I want to practice wrong. If I'm imitating voices that are pronouncing so simple a word completely wrong, and trying to match learned vocabulary with the script for completely different words, I'm not convinced I'm going to benefit as a learner.
I'm debating whether just to cancel my membership and tell them why. I'm really not far enough along to benefit from a language exchange partner, which is something I see the site as actually being good for. And I suspect it does better for some other languages than it seems to be doing for Hindi.
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