What this means is that while in English you say “I eat apples” you’d say “I apples eat” in Bengali. In the beginning, it feels like doing linguistic acrobatics, but quickly you’ll get used to the Bengali language’s peculiarities.įor one thing, Bengali is a subject-object-verb language, where English is a subject-verb-object language. When learning the Bengali language, you need to get used to a new way of thinking, that’s quite different from English. With Bengali, there are different letters for aspirated and un-aspirated consonants and that’s one reasons that account for a lot of the extra letters. Try holding your hand in front of your mouth while saying the two. When consonants are aspirated, they’re pronounced with a little puff of air coming out of your mouth as you pronounce them.
The “t” in stop is not aspirated, but the “t” in “talk” is. Try comparing the word “stop” with the word “talk”. One of the important factors that distinguishes Bengali letters from one another is aspiration. There are numerous different letters that we, in English, would just call “T” or “D” for example. With Bengali, the difficulty lies in the slight differences.
I write about learning the Bengali alphabet more in detail in my article called “ How to learn Bengali” that you have to read.Īs for the pronunciation, Bengali doesn’t represent any extremely foreign or unusual sounds like it’s the case when you learn a language like Arabic. But two weeks will do the trick, and you can actually learn it even quicker. Sure, you need to put in the time to learn the alphabet. Yet they don’t think twice about taking on learning several thousand new words in order to become fluent in another language. Many language students shy away from languages where they’ll have to face a new alphabet. That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually one of the easier aspects of learning Bengali. The Bengali alphabet consists of 50 letters. Is the Bengali Alphabet and Its Pronunciation Hard to Master?