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BANGLA
How to Read Bangla: A Guide for Heritage Readers
Bangla is the 7th most spoken language in the world, and is an Indo-Aryan language. It is primarily spoken in the regions of West Bengal and Bangladesh.
To learn to read Bangla, it is integral to understand the following: grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, and script recognition (including letters and diacritics). The following are a list of resources which can aid your learning process.
01. Flashcards and Resources for Vocabulary and Script Recognition
Start by building a base of letters and everyday words. Embedded flashcard sets let you practise reading without leaving the page.
02. Youtubers
YouTuber LearnChineseWithEmma is a great resource, as she goes over characters, sentence structure, and basic Chinese reading skills. Below are a few videos from her playlist: "Read Chinese Books with Emma" where she reads a picture book outloud.
03. Where to Learn About Bangla Morphology
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
04. Where to Learn About Bangla Grammar
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
05. Sites/Apps
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
06. Kutubee
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
07. Workbooks/Children”s Books
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
08. Listen Along — Audiobooks
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
09. Graded Readers
Follow along with native-speaker recordings of the classic My Bengali Book textbooks. Each chapter is read clearly and at a gentle pace, helping young learners match words on the page to sounds — building reading confidence and proper pronunciation.
10. Textbooks
Textbook: A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language
11. Videos/Resources to Learn Grammar and Apply Script Recognition
Learn Bengali with Baneebee is a great resource to understand the sounds and structures of the Bengali alphabet, reading and writing sentences, if your first language is English. For instance, she teaches you firsthand how to write your own name in Bangla by comparing it to writing other English names.
Below are a few videos from her playlist: "Bengali (How to read and write in Bengali)"
The rest of Learn Bengali with Baneebee's reading Bangla playlist can be found here.
To help test your learning, you can additionally guess how to write Bangla words that you use in your day-to-day life (if you already have a base understanding of Bangla thanks to using Google Translate. This will help you apply and memorize the different letters and allow you to guess-and-check whether you've spelled a word properly. As well, this will help you understand how sounds and consonants change through the addition of each vowel and consonant, as you can use Google Translate's text-to-speech feature to visually hear the differences. In all, a pretty cool way to use technology to learn something new!
Omniglot.com is a useful website full of resources detailing stroke structure of the Bengali alphabet, as well as a list of common phrases and pronunciation.
50languages additional holds a list of common phrases and spellings in various daily scenarios in Bangla.
12. Grammar Books to Learn Grammar
Here are some grammar books that are known to aid English speakers understand Bengali grammar, which will help one break down the sentences that they read in books.
13. Picture Books and Graded Readers to Apply Reading Bangla
Bangladesh creates yearly class and school materials for school children at increasing reading difficulty based on the grade. They include reading comprehension questions as well. These PDFs are primarily found and referenced from https://www.sohopathi.com/, which contain additional resources regarding reading materials. Once graduating from this level of difficulty, it'd help to utilize it and continue to improve reading ability.
