When we first started watching Bollywood movies there weren't a lot of places to buy movies and CDs. Amazon certainly did not have them. I wanted to buy a CD for Joe from the movie "Sarfarosh" so I stopped by an Indian grocery store near work recommended by the Indian women I work with. I managed to find the CD and when I indicated that I wanted to buy it the older Indian gentleman shook his head in the way older Indian gentlemen do and warned me "Hindi talky". I assured him that I knew what I was doing.

Since there is a small chance that I may go to India at the end of the year I decided I might want to learn some Hindi. I have learned a handful of words from Bollywood movies

dil - heart
diwana - crazy
tum - you
zindagi - life
sunam - sweetheart

So I decided to make a conscious effort to translate movie and song names. That was somewhat effective. I retained another handful of Hindi words. I sort of gave up on that method but did not have anything to replace it. That is until I took an internet trip to the iTunes store to subscribe to This American Life. I did some sort of search to find the podcast and among the search results was a spanish language education podcast. I wondered if there was any sort of Hindi podcast and sure enough I found two -- Namaste Dosti - The Learn Hindi Podcast and Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies. India style.

Namaste Dosti - The Learn Hindi Podcast is a good basic learning tool and I will learn the most from it. Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies. India style. is less a series of lessons and more a series of stand-up comic routines about life lessons and maybe some grammar that can be learned from mostly old (70s, 80s) Bollywood films. I find them to be quite humorous. The podcaster is a writer who lives in NYC. Here a less than 3 minute taste:

hindipodcast

Tags: india, travel