Teach Yourself Hindi Script Hacking: The Optimal Pathway to Learn the Hindi Alphabet

If you want to learn Hindi, I definitely recommend getting this book and completing it first. One of the most daunting things about learning Hindi, Korean, Persian, etc. for westerners is the fact that it's written in a totally different alphabet. This book breaks everything down into small bits and builds on each other. It's more in-depth training with the alphabet and writing it than you will get in a standard Hindi course. I know a few people who wouldn't have given up on Hindi so easily if they had gone through this book in its entirety first before trying to learn the language.The best part is that most of the words they have you read are either cognates with English, words borrowed from English, or common names. It doesn't help you to learn how to speak Hindi, but it helps you familiarize yourself comfortably with the alphabet/script. Once you have that part down, then you can move on to learning Hindi and focus on the grammar and sentence structure without getting bogged down in even being able to read it. Highly recommend!

Fantastic little book to crack the Hindi script, I took my sweet time and went through it in a few weeks. Makes reading and writing Hindi childs play.

This book is a little treasure — it makes learning foreign writing system so fun and lightweight in comparison to heavy lifting of alphabet memorization in practically all other sources. Learning written language beforehand provides a solid grounding to begin actual language learning with confidence. I wish similar mnemonics would exist for all possible writing systems.

I have studied Sanskrit off and on for years, usually working with transliterated texts. I could never get the Devanagari (Hindi and Sanskrit script) to stick in my brain. This book introduces the characters in a different order than usual so you don't get them confused with each other and it makes you read tons of things like city names so you get comfortable sounding things out before you forget the new letters you have learned. If you're starting to learn Hindi or Sanskrit and want to learn to write it, this is absolutely the book to start with.