Nepali word of the day
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None of the online Nepali courses or YouTube channels are working for us! We were trying to find a ready made, kid friendly course…but all we could find were random phrase memorisation style programs, or isolated grammar videos.
There was one free course, developed by the Nepali Peace Corp that does seem to scaffold Nepali in a way that helps you build on sentences…and explains the grammar so that you can learn how to put a sentence together and substitute words to say what you actually want to say!!! But it is so old it looks like the pdf download was actually scanned from a document typed by a typewriter!!!! It is not a kid friendly course at all. I originally dismissed it for this reason….But it may be all we have to work with to help us build our Nepali!
SOOOOO…….I have spent the last week following the course myself, learning the aspects of Nepali grammar and memorising the sentences, and starting to get a feel for Nepali word order, and how the pronouns and verbs work in different sentences. I’m a language teacher!!! So I am learning 1 step ahead of the kids, and creating our own resources to learn together in a more kid friendly way!
I am creating our own documents as we go through the course, colour coding grammar aspects so that we can clearly see which word in the sentence is the pronoun, noun, verb, question word, adjective etc., so that we can start to substitute words in the sentence patterns as we learn them. We have colour coded flash cards for games. Kids are writing the conversations in the same colours, and memorising them. We are learning vocab through kinesthetic gesture, props and music, what we call a WAM session, (words, action, music). Most of the gestures in the above video are taken from Auslan Sign Language. We use these to teach Chinese too, so we are already familiar. Gestures help link meaning and aid in recall. The music provides a rhythm and focus, plus the kids get to listen to their fave songs while learning Nepali 🙂
We are finding our way together, and relying on poor quality sound files for pronunciation. So our plan is to learn as many conversations as we can each week, then hope to practice what we have learned via Facetime with a Nepali speaker 🙂
Below are the sentence patterns we are learning first, and the tables below that contain the vocab for those first sentence builders. We have colour coded these on our files as Verbs-Red, Nouns-Blue, Adjectives-Green, Question words-Orange, Pronouns-Purple, Conjunctions and Other words-Black. Sorry I cannot upload tables in colour on this blog 🙁 But you can see from the piks above how we have coloured our own learning materials 🙂
Conversation 1
Conversation 2
Conversation 3
Conversation 4
Conversation 5
Conversation 6
Conversation 7
Verbs | Nouns | ||
chha |
Is (to be )
(to locate things and people) eg. the pen is on the table, He is at home Also quality of something or somebody |
ghar |
home, house |
dinu
|
To give |
jholaa |
shoulder bag |
garnu
|
To do |
kaapi |
note book |
kholnu
|
To open |
kalam |
pen |
paDhnu
|
To read |
kamij |
shirt |
ho |
Is (to be) (define something or somebody) eg. This is my house
Kathmandu is the capital |
kitaab |
book |
hoina
|
Is not
(negative of ho) |
naam |
name |
chhaina |
Is not
(negative of chha) |
astreliya |
Australia |
Questions | Pronouns | ||
Kahaa
|
Where? |
mero |
my, mine |
Ke
|
What? |
tyo |
that |
Kasko
|
Whose? |
yo |
this |
Kasto
|
What colour, How? (Qualitative) |
wahaako |
His,her,hers |
tapaaiko
|
your, yours |
Adjectives | Conjunctions /other | ||
kaalo |
Black
|
hajur |
Yes (polite) |
seto
|
white |
ta |
then /so |
Namaste
|
hello |
||
ni |
(particle)
and how about…? |