Are you ready to read in Devanagari? Let's start! Yes, you've only learned one letter, so you can't really read Hindi, the language, yet. That doesn't stop you from reading Devanagari, the script, though. Let's try the following English sentence, with some of the letters mysteriously replaced with Devanagari letters. Press the button labelled, "Answer" to see the complete sentence in English. I'm sure you'll do quite well!
Just glancing at these sentences probably make you want say the letter, "T,"
for 
because you are used
to a vertcal bar under a horizontal bar indicating, "T." You tend to ignore the
other markings. Take a good look at the letter, and remember that many Devanagari letters
have a horizontal and a vertical bar; concentrate on all the markings of .
Looking back to the practice examples, you should notice two things. First, I sometimes
used to stand for the
English, "k," as in, "karate," but I sometimes used to stand for the English, "c," as in, "cat."
You should know by now that, since Devanagari is phonetic, what's important is
the sound the letter makes. You would not use to stand for the "c" in "race," for example.
Secondly, I cheated a bit on the examples: Since Devanagari is a syllabary, really makes a "ka" sound, not just, "k." The in "RAZY"
is not technically correct, because the resulting word would be something like,
"carazy," which, no doubt, is the way some people pronouce the word, but that's
not exactly standard English. Just keep this in mind, because this discrepancy between the
"ka" and the "k" sound will come in helpful in the future.
Copyright © 1998-2003 Garret Wilson