Hindi Lession By Janak Anand

My name is Janak Anand . I have two daughters and have been living in the US for almost 30 years. I always felt the need to introduce Indian language and culture to my children. It was difficult to expose them to the same experiences I had growing up in India, so I began to seek ways to integrate the culture and language into their everyday lives. A few years ago I stumbled upon an opportunity to introduce my children to the community cultural activities at the Bridgewater temple and community center, organized by Hindu temple and Cultural society of USA and was very happy to see my children getting involved and learning about Indian culture and religions in a fun environment, with other children their age. This motivated me to get involved in Hindi language classes at the temple, with two other volunteer teachers, Mr Heera and Mr Umesh Aggarwal. It was a pleasure teaching letters, combining characters to make short sentences, teaching basic words and expressions, etc. The more familiar the children became, the more tools we were able to use to teach them. We eventually introduced songs and movies as a way to teach them proper dialect and pronunciation. They were then, able to form their own words and sentences to describe themselves, their likes, dislikes, and engage in general conversation with other students in the class.