Learn Bengali

[Arnab]

This Bengali lessons thread is meant to get you up and running in Bengali quickly. By "you" I mean someone who doesn't know how to speak or write Bengali. Someone who considers himself/herself poor at Bengali.

Before you start, think a little bit about what learning a language means. The immediate and basic purpose of a language is to communicate. Speaking a language is basically being able to describe actions or events or objects/animals/persons around us to other human beings. To describe an action, an event or an object/animal/person using Bengali language, you need to know the words in Bengali that let you describe Actions, Events and Objects/Animals/Persons.

Actions are things that are done by some agent. Sentences about actions answer this question: Who did what, to whom, with what, why, when, where and how?

Events are things that happen by themselves, without any agent. Sentences about events answer this question: What happened, when, where, why, and how?

Of course, we can choose to describe just Objects/Animals/Persons as well. Statements about objects answer mainly this question: What kind of Object/Animal/Person?

The three scenarios above pretty much nail down the very essence of any language.

You need to simultaneously learn two kinds of things to express yourself in Bengali: words, and the rules that let you string together words into sentences.

We will first start by introducing the different kinds of words.