8.1: Cultural Notes and Extra/Optional Online Materials
CULTURAL NOTES
| Topics | Explanations | |
| 1. | Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night/Day | In English, we generally wish each other good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, and good day. But in India and South Asian, native speakers, generally speaking, do not wish each other in these ways. People generally say नमस्ते, प्रणाम, राम-राम, etc. |
| 2. | Instruction and polite request | Generally, when you learn Hindi, your instructor, including me, teaches you to use आप form of imperative construction to express polite request/instruction. However, when you travel to India and South Asia, native speakers typically use subjunctive form to express polite request/instruction. You can check if you watch any recipe video by a native Hindi speaker. All the written instruction on road-side and elsewhere in Hindi are also written in subjunctive. |
| 3. | Conjunct Verb |
In this chapter, you learned about conjunct verb. You learned that how we can take noun/adjective/adverb and add करना/होना to form a conjunct verb. However, these days, the influence of English on Hindi language is significant. You may hear native speakers using conjunct verbs with English nouns/adjectives/adverbs + करना
For example: text/message/phone/email/google + करना |
| 4. | Letter writing | Letter writing was very prominent in India. However, after the new development in technologies, and telecommunication boom, people bought mobile phones and now the letter writing does not happen very much. |
| 5. | Festivals | Indian festivals can be divided in two parts, namely, national festival, and regional festival. National festivals are independence day (August 15th), republic day (January 26th), and Gandhi’s birthday (October 2nd). On these public/national festivals, the whole country enjoys break from work. All the offices, colleges, schools, and other institutions are closed. A few examples of regional festivals are holi, pongal, baisakhi, onam, etc. On regional festival day, certain regions of the country observe break from work. |
EXTRA/OPTIONAL MATERIALS
Holi festival:
Hindi song that uses beautiful mixture of subjunctive and future in conditional sentences.