Why is there a resource shortage? And how to overcome it?

[Bob20020]

I've noticed that even though Hindi is spoken by so many people, there is only a tiny amount of resources. From what I've gathered are the short Duolingo tree, the Mango course, and whatever I can scrounge up on Memrise. That's it.

So how does anybody actually learn Hindi without going to India then? I like Hindi, I think for now that I will commit further to it, but there are just no resources. I'd hate to put a lot of time into Hindi early on just to reach an A2/B1 level with nowhere else to go.

Anybody have any ideas?

[deactivated user]

I agree. Languages from India seem to be overlooked, let us say, by language learners and hence those putting together materials. I think there's a myth that everyone speaks English, so why bother learning?

There are books though. Good use of them along with online courses will help you get to A2/B1. And then you're into doing what you can with native materials. I'm learning another Indian language (Bengali) which is even more poorly served than Hindi, and I've reached this point of not having further materials - it gets very hard but persistence is key.

This Hindi course is quite nice, but I'm supplementing the explanations/vocab with Snell's Get Started in Hindi, which covers a similar amount of grammar.

[Darius568602]

Have you tried https://www.hindipod101.com ?
I use it for Hebrew, haven't tried the Hindi version yet.

[Meghan1991]

In my opinion, Hindipod101 is OK, but not worth the money. It's useful for listening practice, but not as a resource to learn about grammar rules.

[Bob20020]

Nah, I looked at it but it isn't free, pretty much everything costs money

[tvl..]

Indeed, the amount and variety of online material for Hindi and other Indian languages is too small. Even finding a good quality online dictionary is difficult

[eMPee584]

https://www.learning-hindi.com/ has a cloud storage of 1.8GiB material.. "The biggest attraction is the folder titled Pratham Books. This folder contains a collection of over 60 Hindi children’s books, along with their English translations so you can check your understanding. Some books even have audio recordings too!"

[eMPee584]

❤️ https://prathambooks.org/our-work/ by the way – Open Educational Resources ftw!