Friday, September 28, 2012

Learning Nepali Online Resources / Links

Schmidt's Dictionary
The best online Nepali dictionary, imo, is the Schmidt one here. You can make a search for English and Nepali words, the nepalese words converted into romanized (a-b-c-) letters. It will list all occurrences of the search word, also when it is just used in the description.

Hindi-English (Google)
Google Translate, unfortunately, does not cover Nepali. However, some words are similar to Hindi, and both Hindi and Nepali use the devanagri typeset. So, you can actually use Google Translate to convert romanized a-b-c letters/words into devanagri! Just select Hindi and write, for instance "namaste". It will convert to "नमस्ते " and, in this case. also give the correct translation "hello". (PS: Remember you have to press 'space'-key after word!)
You can also use unicode nepal for that, perhaps it's better(?).

Hindi-English (HinKhoj)
For translating / looking up single words, this is much better than Google Translate. It's still not Nepali though...

Devanagri-to-Latin converter
If you want to convert the other way, from devanagri to romanized/latin, you'll have to use another tool. Something called MyLanguages.org has such a tool here. This is very useful until you get used to reading devanagri script - which might be a while. In principle, I'd recommend plunging head-on into devanagri, but in practice, I still mostly resort to reading Nepali in Latin letters...

Nepali Primer, a free eBook
There is a complete learners set available from Cornell, with a 200+ page "learn nepali eBook" and accompanying audio (online only). Or here.

Nepali Song Lyrics
Learning Nepali through songs is a nice topping. When you're tired of reviewing flash cards, grammar and those heavy (and necessary) tasks, take a break with a nepali song. This site offers the transcribed lyrics of cheesy Nepalese love songs as well! I suggest reading the lyrics a few times, try to understand it, then listen repeatedly to the same song, over and over... And finally you'll have a great vocabulary for romantic occations! :-)

Various Reading Materials
If you'd like to read nepali language, with nepali letters (devanagri) there are heaps of sites around, large ones and small ones. One of the very active ones is this one called MySansar (claiming to be the first blog in Nepali). Should also be possible to have some communication with nepali native speakers. Another one with various lighthearted stuff, ridiculous videos, gossip etc. is this one...

There's loads of good learning resources available on the net. This is just a few picks. I'm looking forward to comments with more resources !

2 comments:

  1. I mistakely wrote comment in other topic. Can you please change my domain name smslyrics.com to npsongs.com as I have made changes please. Thank you

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  2. https://www.justlearn.com/nepali-tutors
    If you want a good platform for collaboration learning Nepali or even becoming a tutor yourself. We have 67 languages for learning and tutoring.

    ReplyDelete