Learning Urdu Books

[Jessica Wilson]

Iam an Urdu speaker from Pakistan who wrote an account (From Urdu to Hindi, Farsi and Beyond) of an immensely rewarding experience of learning the Devanagari script very quickly. As a result, I have been asked to guide those wishing to cross the divide from the other side. Nothing could be more gratifying and I have decided to devote a separate post to the effort in order to have enough room to indulge myself.

For those who know Hindi, the news is all good. You already know Urdu so there is really nothing to learn. Hindi and Urdu share the same Khari Boli grammar and therefore are the same language from a linguistic perspective. The branches of this common trunk have been pruned and grafted such that we think we are looking at two different species of trees. But that is an illusion; beneath the bramble of new and unfamiliar words the roots are the same.

The first step therefore is to put up the Urdu alphabet on a surface that you look at many times during the day (it is now also available as a phone app). Mark the equivalent Devanagari symbol below each Urdu symbol, and match the sound-symbol pairs. (This chart is not ideal but should work. Unlike Devanagari, Urdu letters have names and the chart gives the names of the Urdu letters in Devanagari. The initial sound of the name is close enough to the sound represented by the letter. I will replace the chart when I come across a more useful one or will make one myself. If you know someone familiar with Urdu you can get off to a fast start by asking him/her to verbalize the sounds of the Urdu letters so you can match them with their Devanagari equivalents.) For those with photographic memories the task of remembering the matched pairs is trivial. For the rest, it would take less than a month devoting a mere ten minutes a day to one sound-symbol pair, alternately thinking of the sound and writing down the symbol associated with it and thinking of the symbol and verbalizing the sound that it represents.

The essential message of this guide is that the task of learning Urdu has to be conceptualized by a Hindi speaking adult very differently from the norm. It is not akin to learning a language; it is more deciphering a code for which the phonetic strategy of matching a sound and a symbol is the most effective. In this frame it should be more like solving a puzzle and therefore the source of adventure, fun and pleasure. Working through the puzzle might also yield some learning which would serve as a bonus.

I should state here that I am not a linguist nor do I know related theories of linguistics. I stumbled upon this approach in my investigations into music thinking about its alphabet (sa, re, ga ma, pa, dha, ni). It occurred to me that while in a spoken language one associates letters of the alphabet with distinct sounds at the same pitch, in music one could associate every letter of the alphabet with the same sound but at a different frequency. In playing around with the idea, I figured I could apply it to learn Hindi and was pleasantly surprised that it worked. This guide is an attempt to generalize from that experience. I would be very much interested in finding out if it proved useful to others or of particular adaptations that proved more effective.

Play around with Google Translator from Hindi to Urdu. As you enter a word in Roman script, it would change into Devanagari and the Urdu equivalent would be displayed. From Hindi to Urdu the translator simply transliterates the shared words which is very helpful for our purposes.

Syed Mohsin Naquvi successfully taught Urdu using the phonetic method at Rutgers University last year. He has generously volunteered to guide readers to work with the multi-language facility of Windows 7, an Urdu script font, and a phonetic keyboard both available from the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) website. He can be contacted at mna...@yahoo.com.

kk: Thanks. I think hanging out with Iranians is probably the fastest way of learning Farsi. To simulate the experience this blog is initiating a new experiment called the Language Exchange. I hope you will take a look and provide some feedback: -exchange/

My own experience with easypersian.com was not as positive for reasons described on the Persian Page in the Language Exchange. I have mentioned a resource that suited me more. Would like your feedback after you have looked at it.

Vinod: I looked at the Bengali alphabet. There is indeed a resemblance to Hindi letters but I had this feeling that whereas I could learn the latter very quickly, it would take me a lot longer to make the same progress with Bengali. It looks like the kind of script one has to grow up with. I have no clear idea what it is but the similarity of shapes seems intimidating. Go further east and look at the Thai script and you might sense my feeling.

The other issue, apart from script, is that of vocabulary. Good Devanagari editions of urdu poetry often have glossaries in them that explain urdu words which are less common in Hindi. There are some good Urdu Hindi dictionaries as well that help in that regard. I have often thought, idly of course, of memorising one such dictionary entirely.

Urdu poetry is so beautiful that the effort would be worthwhile.

You have better suggestions in this regard?

hi , i am a native hindi speaker and can read urdu as well but i am unable to read it very fast,so can you help me regarding this issue of mine.I am quite fluent with urdu vocabulary and can read tough persian /arabic words easily but my only problem is that i have to concentrate very hard while assembling urdu letters.For eg i can read an urdu newspaper if i have time but if i try to read dynamic headlines on a tv channel then i struggle a bit.

Taran: Urdu is not like English in having upper and lower case alphabets that can be used separately to write words. The Urdu alphabet (as depicted in primers) is not used in writing. Shortened forms of the letters are combined in the script. In some sense, the better analogy for Urdu writing would be shorthand. One can use the alphabet to spell out words (as they are in teaching) but not in writing texts.

Akash: I agree nastaleeq can pose problems but mostly the handwritten samples where the quirkiness of individuals creeps in. That is much like deciphering the prescriptions written in English by physicians. Do you have equal difficulty with textbooks? And most Urdu text on the Web is not in nastaleeq. Let me know how you do with the text in this link:

_020.html?urdu

I am working on Nastaleeq and am interested in knowing if there is possibly in English/Urdu a book dealing with the style which states how each character changes shape according to its environment (preceding/following). Thus noon in initial position has two shapes, a half cut bowl or a slant depending upon the character that follows.

Spoken Urdu, Vol. 1 by Muhammad Abd-Al-Rahman Barker and H. J. Hamdani. This book has several chapters in Volume 1 on how each letter group connects or does not connect to the other with very specific notes on slight variations depending on the group.

Dear Anjum Altaf, Luckily I could hit this page of yours wherein have made your sincere efforts to guide the persons intrested to learn Urdu and in time I could understand that I need to approach it differently rather than taking it up as a completly new language. You have certainly inspired me and boosted my interest. Now I will go ahead as per your suggestions and could probably move faster. Thanks and best regards.

Manoj

Dear Mr. Iyengar- I suggest you go for a transliteration dictionary. The Urdu words are given in Romanised font with their English meanings. There are a couple of Android Apps providing these services.

Mr.Iyengar, like you, I was also very keen to learn Urdu and landed up buying this from Amazon. I am still looking for a Devanagari way to learn Urdu words, but till I find one, this Dictionary will help me find words via phonetic listing in Roman characters.

Dear exerji: It has taken us quite a while to overcome the initial doubts. I feel we have reached the point where people feel comfortable with disagreeing knowing that the discourse would be civil and based on logic. We try to critique ideas and not criticize people. We also are comfortable with the knowledge that we might be wrong. If that were not the case, there would be no learning.

This is awesome! I tried a few years ago to learn urdu scripts (for the reasons you mention, an intellectual thrill) but I found it very hard to read the script for words I didnt know (but hearing the same words, it was easy to figure out the context).

Your breaking the code approach seems promising though, I will try it, and report back and maybe this time I will have more success!

Thanx a ton for this great article. It helped a lot in my determining to learn new urdu words. I write poems ( as an amateur ) in devnagri script but use many urdu words which are either a part of modern day hindi or what i have learnt from Bollywood songs. I would definitely love to get some advice from you on how can i improve my urdu vocabulary without learning to write Urdu script.

Thanx again.

Manoj Arya

The thesis of the study quoted in the article is that reading in the Urdu script that activates certain regions in the brain. Like you, I doubt that reading poetry in a certain language, on average, would have a greater impact than reading it other languages.

Here is an abstract for the actual article, which was published in Neuroscience Letters, so I assume that it did undergo fairly rigorous peer review. The actual article also mentions that two factors help Urdu in this regard:

1) Complex nature of script

2) The fact that it is written from right to left

This might be true but without having access to the full article, I cannot be sure that the design fully controls for the context. The study was done in India where one would expect the bilinguals to be more comfortable with Hindi than with Urdu. If the study had been done in Pakistan, the opposite would have been the case and the results might have arrived at the opposite conclusion.

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