About Roman Letters

Englishfrom.com is being designed to teach English from Khmer, Hindi, Spanish, and Cebuano, with plans to expand to other languages. For better or worse, Roman letters are the standard script for writing English, Spanish, and Cebuano. If you write English in another script, most people would think it looks like another langauge. Unfortunately, Roman letters are not real phonetic. This is true with English alone, but it is particularly true when applied to other langauges. English can be phonetically taught without Roman letters, but they might be described as a necessary evil for reading.

Roman letters do provide some useful phonetic cues, but it's helpful to understand how they work with specific languages. Spanish and Cebuano use Roman letters in a more consistent way than English. Devanagari is the stadard script for Hindi, but it can be written in Roman letters, in a manner that resembles Spanish and Cebuano more than English. Khmer does not use Roman letters in a standardized way, and they have limited usefulness for learning Khmer.

Roman letters may not be the most useful script for phonetic cues with leanring English. Hindi spseakers might more effectively learn phonetic English with help from Modified Devangari script. Khmer speakers might more effectively learn phonetic English from another script as well. It may or may not be worth the effort for native Khmer speakers to learn Modified Devanagari for phonetic cues with English. We are hoping to develop Modified Khmer for English cues. Modified Khmer may incorporate Modified Devanagari for English sounds. Even though English can be written without Roman letters, many would say that Roman letters are a critical component of English.

About Devanagari

Devanagari is the official script for writing Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali, as well as many lesser known languages. Historically, it has been used for more, and Hindi2.com currently uses a Modified form of Devangari (MD) for phonetically teaching English and Khmer, with plans to expand to include Spanish, Cebuano, and more. Englishfrom.com is an integrated component of Hindi2com LLC.

Scripts like Devanagari and Roman letters are not langauges, they are tools for writing them. Some would argue that if you write Urdu in Devanagari script, you could call it Hindi. The biggest difference between verbal Hindi and Urdu is in the number of dialects, but there are differences related to Arabic influence beyond the script. Nevertheless, there are enough common words for the association to be made. Nobody who could read Devanagari in English would suggest that it might be Hindi.

Today, many Indians do use Roman letters to write in Hindi, but Devanagari is MORE phonetic. For example, when you write “Hindi” in Roman letters, it has two i’s. When Hindi is written in Devanagari the i’s are different. “Hindi2” is REALLY about using “Devanagari to” provide phonetic cues for learning pronuniciation of words in new languages. “Hindi” is easier to remember and spell. As demonstrated by the example with Urdu, sometimes the biggest differences between Indian languages are the scripts. Sometimes differences between languages are minimized when written in the same script. Even though many languages truly are substantially different, it may be useful to learn different languages with the help of the same phonetic script.

About Khmer

Roman letters and Devanagari are scripts for writing languages, but not languages in themselves. Khmer is the name for the language, script, and culture of Cambodia. The script is related to Devanagari and Thai, through Sanskrit. Neither Hindi or Khmer are tonal, like Thai. Khmer does have the longest alphabet of any language, but it is very phonetic. Roman letters are not particulary useful for Khmer. The biggest problem is with the phontic inconsistency of Roman letters. Devangari is much more useful, as long as you can read Modified Devangari (MD), but the sounds do differ from Indian languages that use traditional Devangari.

We will endeavor to teach English from Khmer, as well as Khmer from English. We will incorporate Roman letters for those who can't read MD, but we do believe MD is the most useful common script. We will be working to develop a Modified form of Khmer (MK) for teaching English, which might incoroporate MD for some English sounds. It's too early to tell if MK might one day be used for teaching other languages, as Hindi2.com does with MD. We are likely to use a modified form of Thai for teaching tonal languages at some point in the future.

What led to Hindi2?

The Founder of Hindi2.com developed an interest in learning new languages during her 15-year marriage to a multilingual Filipino who spoke a different primary language. English was not even their second language. That might have been related to their communication problems.

The Dream

Hindi2.com originated as the Founder's aspiration to learn Hindi through translating her own written content supplemented with point-and-click audio. This desire eventually led her to work with private tutors to create the resource she wanted. She believes that having Hindi2.com available from the start would have facilitated a more efficient Hindi learning experience. She learned Devanagari script more than Hindi. Her desire for learning Hindi lead to a desire to link languages with a modified form of Devanagari script (MD) which links to the full international phonetic alphabet (IPA). The founder thinks she should have started with learning Cebuano years earlier, because of her ex. The first language she is actually learning is Khmer, due to inspiration from her current partner.

Now, the Founder aspires for Hindi2.com and Englishfrom.com to become to valuable resources for others. Her plan is to add breadth and depth to content to appeal to a broader audience than the beta version is starting with. Initially, she will personally curate the content but eventually, she hopes to develop content based on users' interests. Khmer will will be added before documents, later in 2025.