Colloquial Nepali

The author reveals that the Colloquial Nepali is a reprint of an excellent introduction to spoken Nepali. It is a very useful primer on the colloquial idiom of Nepali, for, while the formal and written variety of the language has received a great deal of attention from scholars, there is much less literature devoted exclusively to the spoken form even today. The first few chapters are devoted to the phonetics of Nepali sounds followed by lessons on grammar (along with English-Nepali translation exercises). Finally there is an extremely useful list of more than 1500 commonly used words in Nepali with, of course, their English translations. The author has not forgotten to introduce the learner to some of the more frequently used idioms and slang in Nepali. Based on the Grammar-Translation method that happened to be the standard pedagogy during most of the 20th century for foreign teaching, the book deals with all the three aspects of language i.e., sound, structure and lexicon. As any linguist knows; the phonetic and grammatical organization of language changes very little with time. It is very useful to teach yourself on spoken Nepali.