Question

write a story in Hindi which gives education

Answer 1

Story of Hindi Ki Duniya Project

A Personal Account - Dr Chandrika Mathur

In 1996, I was the mother of a 3-year old and was looking around for good books in Hindi for my daughter.  There were very few good books available for toddlers in Hindi then (the situation has thankfully changed dramatically since then!).  I began to make little rhymes for my daughter using the principle of alliteration rather than formal rhyming.  She enjoyed repeating them with me and I found that she started recognizing some of the Hindi letters, simply because I used to sometimes wave the letter when we repeated the rhyme.

At that time, I used to teach French in the Rishi Valley School.  The students used to begin learning French in the 8th or the 9th standard and used to become quite proficient in speaking and writing French by the time they were in the 10th.  Once, in a casual conversation, the Director of our school, Radhika Herzberger asked me how it was that children learnt French so quickly, whereas many non-Hindi speaking children had a lot of difficulty in learning Hindi even though they began it much earlier.  She asked whether it was because French was easier than Hindi.

My instinctive response was that no language is either more difficult or easier to learn than the other.  Yet, the availability of good tools to teach the language and the approach, method and attitude that the teacher brings to class could make a substantial difference to the experience of the learner. This response was the beginning of a new journey.

In 1997 the school asked me formally to try to develop materials which could help non-Hindi speaking children learn Hindi more effectively.   In the beginning I was quite clueless.  I spoke Hindi as my mother-tongue.  To me it all seemed quite simple.  Where then could one begin?

I had made some rhymes with a certain set of letters of the Hindi alphabet.  All the letters had not been covered.  When my daughter repeated the rhymes, she pronounced them correctly.  When I tried these with some of the non-Hindi speaking children in the school to whom I had begun to teach Hindi by now, their pronunciation left much to be desired!  One little girl cheerfully repeated the rhyme for the sound ‘kha’ by pronouncing all the khas like ‘ka…’ I realised that one point of difficulty for the non-native learners was the presence of aspirates and non-aspirate sounds in Hindi.