Reddit reviews Teach Yourself Hindi: Complete Course (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses) (Hindi Edition)

I use this book and I like it. It starts off with English, transliterated Hindi, and Devanagiri script and eventually drops the transliterated Hindi with the expectation that you've learned the script properly.

Lateish to the party but Teach Yourself Hindi is probably the best Hindi textbook ever made. I'm serious, it's recommended every single time someone asks on /r/languagelearning

If you're like me and had aunties that tried to explain Hindi grammar but utterly failed, this book is super satisfying. It breaks down the language in a way that makes sense and is much easier to learn.

Sure :)

For learning Devanagari I recommend the Hindi Script Tutor online. Devanagari can seem a bit daunting at first, but it is actually a pretty pleasant script to work with- it's pretty consistent and after a while it'll be as easy as reading the Latin script! I personally find it much easier than Urdu script (not to deter you from learning that!)

For actually learning the language, the go-to book is Teach Yourself Hindi by Rupert Snell. Like I said earlier, Hindi: An Essential Grammar is good. There are two intermediate readers that I know of: Intermediate Hindi Reader by Usha Jain (I've heard that her other two books on beginner and advanced Hindi grammar are good too) and The Routledge Intermediate Hindi Reader. I have only used Jain's book, but the Routledge one looks good too and I think it has more updated texts.

There is also a Door Into Hindi, which is great. It is just like Darvazah, except that it actually works lol (if it doesn't work, try a different browser or close out and try again- sometimes it gets a little glitchy). Learning Hindi is also a pretty good website.

It's just never really taught/learned by non-Indians, so most people would never even think of it.

I started off by buying this great book: https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Hindi-Complete-Language/dp/034086687X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468899902&sr=1-3&keywords=teach+yourself+hindi

I taught myself how to read and write first (their script is called Devangari) while watching some Bollywood movies to hear how it should sound. After that, I just went through the entire book to learn the basics of spoken Hindi. By the end of the book, I could read/write whatever I want, and had a basic grasp on simple Hindi.

When I finished the book, I took two semesters of Hindi in college under a great teacher. By the end of these two semesters, I was as comfortable with Hindi as I was with Spanish after three years of high school. Again, I watched Bollywood movies and listened to Hindi music frequently the whole time. I had watched over 100 Bollywood films at this point.

Things got a little weird after that. Due to schedule conflicts, I took a semester off of Hindi (skipping 3rd semester), then skipped right into 4th semester Hindi the following semester. My teacher for 4th semester was awful, so I really didn't learn anything. Next year, due to lack of Hindi teachers, 5th semester Hindi was blended with an advanced graduate level Hindi literature course taught by an extremely intelligent professor. I was basically a 2nd-year Hindi student in a graduate level Hindi class, and it was really too over my head for me to learn anything. So, sadly, I ended college with probably 2-3 semesters worth of Hindi knowledge.

Learning Hindi on your own is possible, but difficult. There are much fewer resources than Spanish or French, and even fewer people to practice talking with. With dedication, it can be done. If your university offers courses, they're usually great. The one thing Hindi had going for it was its films and music, which I found entertaining enough to spend a lot of time getting into, and it let me have an masterful grasp on how the language should sound and be spoken. My grammar and vocabulary may not be the best, but my pronunciation is excellent. I actually sang Hindi songs every semester at cultural shows, and Indian parents were always coming up to me afterwards astonished at how indistinguishable my pronunciation was from native speakers.

Toward the end of college, the culture had become more important to me than the language. I spent my time focused on dancing (Bhangra and Bollywood Fusion), singing, and watching films, and my Indian friends didn't really speak Hindi among each other. That said, if I took the time to study on my own more, I could probably be fluent.

Right now, I'd be comfortable going to India and getting around with just Hindi, but I couldn't maintain an intellectual discourse or debate with somebody. I can understand the gist of a movie without subtitles, but I prefer to leave them on so I don't get confused in complicated scenes with difficult vocabulary. I can understand a good portion of what I hear in music, but Hindi sentence structure is much more fluid than English, so it's hard to follow. Words in a sentence can be changed around to almost any order (often in music/poems, less often in written/spoken Hindi), so it's hard to follow sometimes.

Edit: I didn't answer some of your specific questions. When I taught myself how to read/write, I spent maybe an hour per day doing flashcards. I had all their characters memorized in a week. During college, I'd maybe spend 30 minutes to an hour at home doing homework or studying per night. There was a two year period where I watched a Bollywood movie once ever 2-3 days, and they're 3 hours each. I listened to Hindi music as often as I would listen to any other music, so pretty frequently. I taught myself the basics with the book I linked earlier, and during college I used a book our university had made, so it can't be bought. With some googling, there are a few online books/resources you can use to learn Hindi for free. I would recommend not using Rosetta Stone--it's inefficient.

I started learning Hindi 6 years ago, and I rarely use it now, but I still dance, and I still maintain a bunch of Indian friends. I still watch and listen to Hindi movies and music. I frequently attend Indian cultural events (or perform at them). I have a lot of Indian coworkers, and my understanding of their culture has made me get along with them well. I grew up in a small, 99% white town, and learning Hindi was the key to me adopting another culture. It simply wouldn't have happened without starting to learn Hindi. My life is profoundly different (in the best way) than what it would have been if I just took French in college and never got into the culture (because French culture isn't really that different from American culture, compared to something like Indian culture). I feel like I now live in two worlds, American and Indian, and I feel like a much better person than I ever have been before.

Sorry this was so rambling and incoherent--I was too lazy to edit.