Colloquial Hindi

Rating:
Summary: Great! It was wonderful
Review: It was an excellent book! Very helpful

Rating:
Summary: Book great, cassettes okay...
Review: This book is clear and comprehensive, yet simple enough for a complete beginner. The reader can choose to learn just spoken Hindi or to also learn to read and write since all of the dialogs are written in romanized Hindi as well as in the Devanagari syllabary. The cassettes are necessary, but poor compared to the cassettes from other courses. The dialogs are read only once, very quickly, with almost no opportunity to practice repeating what you hear. The leftover space on the tapes are filled with discussion in English of questionable utility.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent guide to learning Hindi!
Review: This book taught Hindi and Indian like no other! It felt like there was an actual teacher in my house giving me a lecture, it's more than just a book!

Rating:
Summary: Useless
Review: This book uses one of the weirdest romanization schemes I've ever seen. In addition, it uses this scheme throughout, making learning the Devanagari script more difficult. The grammatical explanations ramble a lot and the vocabulary words tend to be unrelated to each other. This is one of the worst self-taught Hindi courses out there.

Rating:
Summary: Barhaiya! Really excellent
Review: This is a fantastic resource. I have just received my copy and already I am in love with it. It is very well-written, and strikes a nice balance between the structure of the langauge and usability. I especially like that the author is no fan of prescriptivists, and so presents "Hindi as she is spoke". I would not say that it is "better" than Snell's TYH, but it takes a slightly different approach, and is, in my opinion a great complement to the other work.

My only gripes are the way that all the devanagari is stuck at the back (grr!) and that I had to buy the book and CD separately. Even with those minuses, it is absolutely worth it, and I would rate it a must have.