Illustrated Nepali Flash Cards

First I make a flashcard for an object, then I spell out the name of that object using letter flashcards. The one in the setup is kalam (pen). Hopefully they're all obvious from the illustrations.

This is how I've been studying Nepali lately.  I was getting fed up with not knowing a lot of words that I regularly want to say, as well as not being able to read or write Nepali, and so I made a set of flash cards.

1 card for each consonant
1 card for each vowel and its "consonant modifying symbol" (which I will explain later)
1 illustrated card each for a bunch of nouns I wanted to remember, and to know how to write down.

The Nepali alphabet works like this: There are 36 consonants and 15 vowels, though for practical purposes, you only need to learn 13 of the vowels, because 2 of them are pretty rare.


All of the consonants in Nepali have an implied vowel sound (a, but pronounced 'uh') built into the end of them. Wikipedia tells me the name for consonant sounds that cannot be pronounced without an adjacent vowel is symphona. The 'uh' sound is consistent for every consonant, and always comes at the end (coda) of the syllable (unlike in English, where different standalone consonants are pronounced with different vowels, P= pee, F= eff, etc., which may be at the onset or coda of the syllable).

However, each vowel symbol in Nepali has a companion, smaller symbol that can be fused right onto the body of a consonant, to change the implied 'uh' sound to any other vowel sound.


So each of the 36 consonants ends in an 'uh' sound, and to change that 'uh' sound into a different vowel, you tack on an extra piece to the written letter. Since the symbol used for a lone-standing vowel, or a vowel at the beginning of a sentence, is different from the one tacked onto consonants to modify their ending sound, you basically have 26 symbols to memorize in order to use JUST VOWELS.

Example:

This is the consonant "ka"

and...

This is the vowel "o" (left)  and its consonant-modifying companion symbol

 Combine them and you get...

"ko"

I felt pretty hopeless about learning this written language until I started making flash cards. Making them is so fun, though, that I do it all the time, and am memorizing symbols at a rate of about two per day.  One month and I'll be writing sentences!