Review: Bengali (Bangla) Dictionary and Phrasebook

It’s one of the quirks of Bengali that a language estimated to be the seventh most spoken in the world has not had a dedicated phrasebook available for at least five years.

Lonely Planet’s Bengali phrasebook ran to just a single edition in the late 1990s, seemed a little ropey in places and hasn’t been available for years. It may have been partly replaced by their combined Bengali-Hindi-Urdu phrasebook, but it’s not the same as a dedicated resource for Bangla leaners.

Happily this situation is remedied this year with the publication of Hanne-Ruth Thompson’s Bengali (Bangla) Dictionary & Phrasebook.

Google translates Bengali

Now this is interesting. I’ve blogged before about Google’s tools and how they can help with learning Bengali, but this week they made another advance.

As part of an expansion into what it terms the Indic web, Google now translates Bengali (along with Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu).

iPhone apps for Bengali transliteration

Bangla Keyboard app

Transliteration – converting  a word’s presentation from one script to another – is an important part of learning Bengali for any English speaker.

There are online tools that will do this for you, changing your typing from the Roman script in which English is written into bangla. Google’s transliteration service is a useful online tool, and there are also several Bengali transliteration iPhone apps.

The two apps I’ve downloaded are Bangla Keyboard (aka banglaTyping) and iTransliterate.

DIY iPhone app for revising Bengali

My last post mentioned a DIY iPhone Bengali revision app and, more or less ready, I’ll tell you about it now.

I wanted an easy way of viewing my 5 Bengali Words posts on my iPhone.

So, impressed by the Tumblr iPhone app, I’ve started putting basic version of my Bengali vocabulary posts onto my new Learning Bengali Tumblr site.

Bengali children’s cartoon Meena

There’s no 5 Bengali words post this week as I’m busily working on incorporating them into a DIY iPhone Bengali revision app. All being well I’ll have it ready next week, but I should warn you in advance it’s a very DIY solution.

In lieu of another 5 Bengali words I’ve posted a Meena cartoon, a recommendation from a reader (who, incidentally, has just started her own Bengali blog My Bangla Diary, which I’d encourage you to check out). 

Learning Bengali page updated

I’ve updated my Learning Bengali page, adding in summaries of my recent posts on Bengali.

There haven’t been as many of these as I would have liked, my best laid plans having been waylaid somewhat by the demands of the school holidays.

Nevertheless there are new entries on the page for an iPhone phrasebook app, grammar notes on pronouns and a video of numbers from 1 to 50. The latter was my first try at producing something for YouTube and features my Bengali father-in-law’s narration over slides in Bangla script.

Lingopal Lite (Bengali iPhone app)

On the hunt for iPhone apps that would be useful to help me continue learning Bengali I downloaded the Lingopal Bengali Lite app over the weekend.

Bengali possessive pronouns (my, your, her/his, their)

Following the previous post on Bengali personal pronouns, today’s is on possessive pronouns.

To recap, Bengali doesn’t distinguish between genders (so in the third person one word can be used for ‘he’ or ‘she’), but it does distinguish between proximity.

Thus, depending on whether a person is, whether here, there or elsewhere, you would use এ, ও or সে for the singular, familiar form of ‘you’.

Bengali personal pronouns (I, you, he/she, they)

Today’s post is on Bengali personal pronouns (possessive pronouns will be covered in the next post).

Bengali doesn’t distinguish between genders (so in the third person one word can be used for ‘he’ or ‘she’), but it does distinguish between proximity.

Thus, depending on whether a person is, whether here, there or elsewhere, you would use এ, ও or সে for the singular, familiar form of ‘you’.

Bengali numbers (video)

Bengali numbers are pretty irregular, with only a little relation between, say, the words for 23, 33, 43 etc, compared to English or French. Because of this I’d only learnt from 1-30 until recently.