Lonely Planet Hindi, Urdu & Bengali Phrasebook & Dictionary

By Richard Delacy and Lonely Planet

Book Overview

Lonely Planet's Hindi, Urdu and Bengali Phrasebook and Dictionary is your handy passport to culturally enriching travels with the most relevant and useful Indian phrases and vocabulary for all your travel needs. Ask directions in Delhi, haggle like a local at street bazaars and chat with locals; all with your trusted travel companion.

Get More From Your Trip with Easy-to-Find Phrases for Every Travel Situation

Feel at ease with essential tips on culture, manners, idioms and multiple meanings

Order with confidence, explain food allergies, and try new foods with the menu decoder

Save time and hassles with vital phrases at your fingertips

Never get stuck for words with the 3500-word two-way, quick-reference dictionary

Be prepared for both common and emergency travel situations with practical phrases and terminology

Meet friends with conversation starter phrases

Get your message across with easy-to-use pronunciation guides

Inside Lonely Planet's Hindi, Urdu and Bengali Phrasebook and Dictionary:

Full-colour throughout

User-friendly layout organised by travel scenario categories

Survival phrases inside front cover for at-a-glance, on-the-fly cues

Convenient features

5 Phrases to Learn Before You Go

10 Ways to Start a Sentence

10 Phrases to Sound like a Local

Listen For - phrases you may hear

Look For - phrases you may see on signs

Shortcuts - easy-to-remember alternatives to the full phrases

QandA - suggested answers to questions asked

Covers

Basics - time, dates, numbers, amounts, pronunciation, reading tips, grammar rules

Practical - travel with kids, disabled travellers, sightseeing, business, banking, post office, internet, phones, repairs, bargaining, accommodation, directions, border crossing, transport

Social - meeting people, interests, feelings, opinions, going out, romance, culture, activities, weather

Safe Travel - emergencies, police, doctor, chemist, dentist, symptoms, conditions

Food - ordering, at the market, at the bar, dishes, ingredients

The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet's Hindi, Urdu and Bengali Phrasebook and Dictionary, a pocket-sized comprehensive language guide, provides on-the-go language assistance; great for language students and travellers looking to interact with locals and immerse themselves in local culture.

About Lonely Planet:

Lonely Planet, a Red Ventures Company, is the world's number one travel guidebook brand. Providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973, Lonely Planet reaches hundreds of millions of travellers each year online and in print and helps them unlock amazing experiences. Visit us at lonelyplanet.com and join our community of followers on Facebook (facebook.com/lonelyplanet), Twitter (@lonelyplanet), Instagram (instagram.com/lonelyplanet), and TikTok (@lonelyplanet).

'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' Fairfax Media (Australia)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1787013499
• ISBN13: 9781787013490
• Release Date: November 2024
• Publisher: Lonely Planet
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 3.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Good introduction to Hindi & Urdu

I've been using the computer program Rosetta Stone to learn Hindi, and it's extremely helpful in getting a person started with learning the grammar, some basic words, and the script. But Rosetta Stone doesn't teach you the really crucial basic phrases, like "Hello, how are you?", "My name is Bob," or "Where is the bathroom?" That's the specialty of this phrasebook--teaching you the basic phrases you'll need to get by. It also shows the basics of how to read the Urdu and Hindi scripts, but it's not necessary to learn them to use it, since the phrases all have phonetic renderings. One of the other reviewers complained that this phrasebook won't teach you the language. But it's not meant to; it's just supposed to help you get started, or to help you get by when you're not planning to actually learn the language. The organization of the book is very useful, since it's grouped into sections for different kinds of phrases, making it easy to find the stuff you're most interested in. The dictionary in the back, when you're going from Hindi or Urdu to English, is arranged in the order of the Hindi or Urdu alphabets. Maybe this doesn't make the most sense for English speakers, who if they're just starting aren't going to memorize the order of all the letters in the Hindi and Urdu alphabets. The other reviewer complained about this, but since the dictionaries aren't very long, I don't think it's a big deal. The dictionaries also have the phonetic spellings, so you can flip through pretty quickly to find the letter you're looking for. My main complaint is that the Urdu font in this book is kind of hard to read. It might just be because I first learned the script from another book that used a different font, and that's what I'm used to now. But I think that with the font used in this book, it's inherently harder to tell which letter is which, making it harder on a beginner.