Proposed steps
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Learn to read Devanagari. The 47-character script used to write Nepali and many Indian languages and thus “one of the most used writing systems in the world” according to Wikipedia. Enables to read street names, person names etc., and thus of immediate benefit.
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Learn an essential vocabulary (500-1000 words).
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Learn essential grammar.
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Practice
Tools
What we’re looking for here is to eventually have a complete, open source toolkit for studying Nepali. Similar to the one I created for Spanish: “Towards the free and open way of learning Spanish” – see there for inspiration and basic architecture of such a toolkit.
List of tools so far:
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Google Input Tools. This a web application and Windows software (probably also running in Wine) that allows typing in foreign scripts incl. Devanagari by writing the Latin transliteration and choosing from proposed words.
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Wikipedia: Nepali language. Mentions that 80% of its vocabulary is Hindi, so it’s useful for living in India and learning Hindi as well.