How to learn the Gujarati alphabet

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by some 46 million people around the world, according to the Ethnologue language report. The majority of people who speak Gujarati live in states of India such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. However, there are also important Gujarati communities in Bangladesh, Kenya and the United Kingdom. Gujarati is written with a special script that has evolved from the Devanagari script that is used to write another indigenous language such as Hindi. It is important to master this alphabet if you want to be able to read and write in Gujarati .

one

Get a letter of the Gujarati alphabet . This can be downloaded from the website at Omniglot. Print the letter and put it in a prominent place in your home where you see it daily. Look at the table as many times as possible in order to familiarize yourself with the shapes of the letters and the general style of the Gujarati alphabet.

two

Learn the pronunciation of the letters. Websites such as Ukindia and e-Gujarati offer free online resources that will help you master the pronunciation of the various symbols. Listen to the audio tracks on these websites and practice the sounds. Record your own pronunciation and play again with the same, comparing your efforts with the natives on the Internet. Identify the sounds that are particularly difficult for you and strive for them.

3

Draw the letters of the Gujarati alphabet. Focus on learning one letter at a time. Draw each letter on a piece of paper many times until you are able to reproduce the shape of the card models on your alphabet table. Spend a specific time each day to practice the Gujarati lettering so you can get a learning pattern. At the beginning of each period of your practices, review the letters you learned the day before. Learn again if necessary.

4

Practice what you have learned by writing short phrases in Gujarati . The active use of the language will reinforce your knowledge of the alphabet. At this stage, it is not important if the sentences make sense or are written in grammatical Gujarati . Read to yourself the phrases you build out loud for a new opportunity to practice pronunciation.

• Ask a friend to review their attempts to write gujarati letters and see if they can identify the characters that correspond to the model of the alphabet table. If you are not able to find out which letter you have drawn, this is a clue to practice writing the letter more.