Technology, books, travel, and linguistics
Language isn’t just a means of communication but it is the medium of propagating culture. That’s why culturally Canada is similar to the USA while Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) to Spain. One huge advantage the USA has […]
While writing text in Hindi/Sanskrit (Devanagari script), I need a quick way to insert the Avagraha symbol(ऽ). It turns out there is an undocumented shortcut on the Mac Hindi QWERTY keyboard for that and that is shift + \
There are at least three different ways “ch” gets pronounced in English words and that tells you the origin of those words.
English has a very commonly used vowel that doesn’t exist in Indic languages natively. It is ɛ– Open-mid front unrounded vowel. Consider the word bet, its vowel sound is halfway between bat/बैत़ and bait/बेत़. This vowel is fairly common in […]
Tharman, the 9th president of Singapore is of Indian Tamil ethnicity. The pronunciation of his first name shows how various languages use Latin alphabets.
Hindi and English have several similar yet distinct phonemes.
The phonetics of German are relatively easy for more Hindi speakers except for a few sounds that are more nuanced.
Latin script is the most recognized script in the world today. Most Western European languages, including some widely spoken ones like English, Spanish, and French use the same script with minor differences. The pronunciation variation, however, is a different matter […]
A few years back, I wasted time on Duolingo trying to learn Spanish. I no longer do that and you shouldn’t. Here’s why it’s not effective and better alternatives.
Every resource that I came across tries to teach Spanish to English speakers. Those who already know Hindi/Devanagari have certain advantages. Both in terms of producing the correct Spanish pronunciation as well as being able to read/speak the Spanish language. […]