Learning Nepali
Self-Study
In terms of self-study, by far the best and most widely available course is Teach Yourself Nepali by Dr. Michael Hutt and Professor Abhi Subedi (Hodder & Stoughton, first published in 1999). Aside from Hutt and Subedi's course, other beginner's courses include Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke's free online materials, available at http://www.ms.dk/nepali; Tika Bahadur Karki and Chij Kumar Shrestha's Basic Course in Spoken Nepali (Kathmandu, multiple editions), which was designed as an instructional book for Peace Corps volunteers to learn conversational Nepali; and Dr. David Matthews' Course in Nepali, which focuses more on literary Nepali and is useful for advanced students. For an in depth discussion of the pros and cons of the various Nepali instructional courses available, read Mark Turin's review article on the subject. Click here to access the catolog entry and a PDF of the review.
Courses in Nepal
There are many opportunities for learning Nepali in Nepal, in both formal and informal contexts. Most study abroad programs based in Kathmandu offer intensive Nepali language instruction, including the Cornell-Nepal Study Program, the SIT (School for International Training) Nepal program and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Study Abroad program in Nepal. Other language courses are offered through Tribhuvan University, Nepal's primary university with its major campus in Kirtipur just outside of Kathmandu.
Courses outside Nepal
As for learning Nepali outside of Nepal, the language is offered at many locations all over the world. A few well-established sites in the West include the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), in London, Cornell University's summer intensive Nepali language course and the semester courses in Nepali offered throughout the year by the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI) offers Nepali language courses for beginners. Cornell's Nepali language instructors, Banu Oja and Shambhu Oja, have written a coursebook and dictionary, both of which can be ordered by clicking here. Banu Oja, Shambhu Oja, Mark Turin and Elisabeth Uphoff's Nepali - English and English - Nepali Glossary has recently been updated and is available online here. Nepali is also taught at the India Instituut in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, by Rene Huysmans and Mark Turin. Turin and Huysmans have written and published a Nepali language course in Dutch, entitled Nepali voor Beginners.
Dictionaries
A number of English-Nepali, Nepali-English and Nepali-Nepali dictionaries are on the market, although most are available only in Nepal. Two of the most useful for beginners are Ratna's Nepali-English-Nepali Dictionary by Professor Babulall Pradhan (Ratna Pustak Bhandar, Kathmandu, 2001) and Ralph Lilley Turner's Nepali Dictionary (first published in 1931 by the Royal Asiatic Society, but still reprinted in India every couple of years). Prakash A. Raj has recently compiled a Nepali-English/English-Nepali dictionary and phrasebook. Banu Oja, Shambhu Oja, Mark Turin and Elisabeth Uphoff's recently revised Nepali-English, English-Nepali Glossary can be ordered from Cornell by clicking here or viewed as an online database here. We have digitised two classic Nepali dictionaries which can now be downloaded as PDF files: Major T. Warren's 1944 Shorter English-Nepali Dictionary [8.4 MB] and G. G. Roger's 1950 Colloqiual Nepali [9.7 MB].
Online Resources
The Web is increasingly becoming a forum for the dissemination and sharing of Nepali language materials. Aside from Unicode tools which are compliant with most modern PCs and Macs running OS X, online resources require your computer to have one or more Nepali fonts installed, for which you should refer to our page on Nepali fonts. There are six online Nepali dictionaries: Banu Oja, Shambhu Oja, Mark Turin and Elisabeth Uphoff's Nepali-English/English-Nepali Glossary and Mark Turin's 1700-entry Unicode searchable Thangmi-Nepali-English Dictionary, both of which require a Windows PC to have the Kalimati Unicode font to view the Thangmi and Nepali (download Kalimati font). The font is NOT required for Apple Mac computers running OS X.2 or later. Bruce Adcock at Ohio State University has compiled a 420-word online Nepali dictionary and a verb conjugation chart, both of which are very easy to use. Nepal Homepage's dictionary requires installation of the Preeti font, which you can download from the THDL Nepali fonts page (note: you may need to increase the text size of your browser to read the Nepali script easily). The online dictionaries hosted by the Digital Dictionaries of Asia project of the Digital South Asia Library at the University of Chicago include online versions of Sir Ralph Lilley Turner's classic comparative dictionary of Nepali and Ruth Laila Schmidt's more recent dictionary of modern Nepali. Both are best viewed with a Unicode compliant machine.
Cornell's Nepali-English/Nepali-English Dictionary
Mark Turin's Thangmi-Nepali-English Dictionary
Bruce Adcock's 420-word Unicode Nepali dictionary
Nepal Homepage's English to Nepali Dictionary
Ralph Turner's Comparative Dictionary of the Nepali Language
Ruth Laila Schmidt's Practical Dictionary of Modern Nepali
Dr. Karl-Heinz Kraemer has a number of dictionaries available on his excellent NepalResearch.org website. He has compiled both a Nepali-English and a Nepali-German dictionary which can be searched using Adobe Reader after being downloaded for free from his site. The Nepali font used in his dictionaries is embedded, but it helps to have Kantipur installed on your own computer.
There are a handful of interactive language learning tools for Nepali which are worth exploring:
How to Learn Nepali by Janak Education Materials Center Limited (for which you will have to download and install their custom font)
Webshaala by Thamel Dot Com
Hindi Script Tutor designed for SOAS, which is also largely appropriate for Nepali
Sanskrit Alphabet Tutor
Audio files of correct pronunciation of Sanskrit characters
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