The Bengali short course materials are available for download at https://www. livelingua. com/course/fsi/Bengali_Short_Course. While this short course won’t get you anywhere near fluency, it can serve as a good introduction and allow you to carry on basic conversations in Bengali. Live Lingua also has the US Peace Corps Bengali course, available for free at https://www. livelingua. com/project/peace-corps/Bengali/.
Scroll down until you see the entry for Bengali. There are links to the different resources that are available. Despite the fact that these are categorized on the page as “products,” everything can be accessed or downloaded for free. While most of the materials are intended for military personnel deployed overseas, there are basic guides that would be helpful for any student of the language. For example, the Bengali Cultural Orientation program, located at http://fieldsupport. dliflc. edu/products/bengali/bn_co/default. html, will give you a better understanding of the country of Bangladesh as well as Bengali culture and traditions. This knowledge will give you a deeper appreciation and understanding of the language.
You can listen to Bengali authors reading their own work for free at http://www. loc. gov/acq/ovop/delhi/salrp/bengali. html. This site is part of the South Asian Literary Recordings Project, run by the US Library of Congress New Delhi Office. Find more audio recordings available for free online by doing an online search for “Bangla audio,” “Bangla radio,” “Bangla podcasts,” or similar.
Reddit also has a Bengali language forum available at https://www. reddit. com/r/bengalilanguage/. There are a number of videos posted that can help you learn basic grammar and vocabulary. Advanced students and native speakers also participate in this forum to help beginners who want to learn the language.
With transliteration, you’ll be able to learn new words and communicate in the language more quickly. Then, as you transition to Bengali script, you can start writing words immediately.
There is also a transliteration schema available on the Virtual Bangladesh website with comparisons of the sounds to English words. Go to http://www. virtualbangladesh. com/bengali-tutorial/bengali-tutorial-transliteration-schema/ to view or print it.
Vowels can be written either as separate letters, or by using various marks around the consonant to indicate how it should sound. Because the Bengali alphabet is closely related to the Devanagari alphabet, you may find it easier to learn if you are already familiar with the Devanagari script, which is used in Hindi, Sanskrit, and many other Indo-Aryan languages.
Go to https://www. youtube. com/user/talkingbees to view the videos or subscribe to the channel.
You may also be able to find a font you can use at http://www. nongnu. org/freebangfont/. These Bengali fonts are open-source and provided for free as part of volunteer-run service.
Bengali nouns are not assigned a gender, as they would be in some languages such as Spanish or French, so you don’t have to worry about using the correct articles or changing adjectives for agreement.
Possessors, numerals, and adjectives come before nouns. However, articles (words similar to a, and, and the in English) come after the noun they relate to. This word order can be difficult for native English speakers. If you speak other head-final languages, such as Japanese, it might be easier. German also has some head-final verb phrases.
Bengali also has fewer of these words than exist in English and other European languages. For example, there is only one word in Bengali that is used to mean under, underneath, beneath, below, and down. Despite having fewer words, there are some situations in which a preposition would not be used in English at all, but a postposition is required under the Bengali grammar rules.
The BBC has a news site in Bengali with text and videos, which may be a good place to start. Go to https://www. bbc. com/bengali.
