Vikram Chandra, for his Bombay crime novel _Sacred Games_, has for a
long time had excellent glossaries available online for his novel at
http://vikramchandra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=174  He just wrote me
today to tell me that the Sacred Games glossary is now available in
Excel / OpenDoc format, see the XLS link on referenced page.

I highly recommend the glossary as a good resource for contemporary
Bombay and urban Hindi, slang, street gaalii, Hinglish with
considerable Marathi and other India language references. I plan to
use the Excel version, which I recommended he create, for use in my
own Supermemo ( www.supermemo.com ) Hindi study program. The
spreadsheet can easily be adapted to Supermemo use.

I would be interested also in hearing if anyone else is using
Supermemo or Flashcardexchange ( www.flashcardexchange.com ) for their
Hindi study. I have integrated many flashcardexchange card sets into
my supermemo database and use supermemo every day. I am slowly
building up to a thousand cards and hope eventually to have a 3000+
card database, which will be a very substantial working vocabulary.
Hopefully eventually I will have something worthy of publication.

I have two years of undergraduate study Hindi at University of
Wisconsin-Madison, as well as two years of study in Varanasi and New
Delhi. I am interested in contemporary urban and technical/engineering/
IT Hindi.

Jeffrey

Thanks, Jef, for posting this. I'm actually reading _Sacred Games_
right now, and was meaning to go check out the glossary. I was able to
guess the meaning of many of the Indian language references in SG but
there are also a lot that I couldn't guess.

<snip>

I am fairly useless with rote learning of vocabulary. If there is to
be any chance of any of it 'sticking', I have to learn it in context.
Does anyone else have this problem? Is it simply a case of
perseverance? The way it tends to stick is to translate texts and keep
lists of vocabulary in a column next to the source text. Then I carry
that around with me and read it on the train.

Cheers
Kellie

I personally cannot imagine a better way of developing a vocabulary of
several thousand words than using Supermemo. Supermemo, featured in
last month's Wired magazine [ http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak
], is more than just rote flashcard drilling. It uses a time-based
algorithm to bring back cards at the proper moment so that you retain
the information permanently. Traditional memorization techniques only
allow retention of about 40% of the information studied. In the late
1800s scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the "spacing effect":
the idea that memorization needs to be done on intervals that follow
an exponential-like curve.

If I could currently be immersed in a Hindi-speaking environment, that
would be ideal. But that is impractical for me now. With Supermemo I
can study all day long using my Palm Treo. By the time I get back to
India I want to be beyond intermediate fluency and since I already
have several years of college training, and am working with Shapiro's
Primer and Jain's Introduction to Hindi Grammar, I think by next year
I will have attained my goal without returning to classes. I am an
autodidact by nature.

Even if I were in an immersive language environment I still would want
to supplement that with a disciplined vocabulary-building program. But
some of that suits my temperament, and might not work well for others.
It works for me.

Interesting! I think the Pimsleur method worked using a similar time-
based mechanism...The repeating of information at the right spacing
might well overcome the problem I have had of material losing its
meaningfulness out of context. If I'm being reminded of the content at
appropriate intervals I might retain the context too.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm just about to load up with a bunch
of vocabulary I've captured from translating texts and trying to make
some of it stick over the next few weeks, so will read the Wired
article.

On Jun 10, 12:41 pm, Jef <bennerjeff...@gmail.com> wrote: