Lonely Planet Hindi, Urdu & Bengali Phrasebook 3rd Ed.: 3rd Edition [Paperback]

I saw the previous version in a library and wanted my own copy. I bought the latest version - big mistake. So I went off and bought a second copy of the previous version. The publishers broke a very good product - a pity.
Why? The old version was Hindi and Urdu - the new version has Bengali also. Although the newer version is thicker, a lot of useful information
was either removed or condensed in such a manner that is very hard to assimilate. Also the number of entries in the dictionary was reduced. I only wanted Hindi. The only good point about the book that there is an enhanced culninary reader (i.e. menu decrypter!).
Buy the old one and please (publisher) - 'if it aint broke - don't fix it'

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.

has good pronounciation thru it all and dictionaries and phrases-everything how to write it too..soo very usuable i would say