Writing Hindi ? Why would you need to learn that ?

The train had left Chengannur station and in another 15 minutes it will halt at my station for
a brief 1-minute before moving on to its final destination of Trivandrum. My compartment
being somewhere in the middle of the train, I was walking through the vestibuled coaches to
the rear of the train, since my Dad would be waiting at the car park, which happens to be
located where the rear end of the train would stop.

As I walk through the mostly empty compartments, I chance across a tourist (a white guy - European most probably) who is hunched over a notebook, writing something. Curiousity
gets the better of me and I take a quick dekko.

He has with him some pages torn from a student's notebook, with very basic Hindi words
written on them - you know the kind you would start off with initially, the Hindi equivalent
of "A for Apple", "B for Bat", "C for Cat", etc. He is labouriously copying them to his notebook.

I can see that he is trying to learn the Hindi script, though I fail to understand why he wants
to learn writing Hindi in the first place. If he plans to tour North India, it would definitely help
to know to speak Hindi. And if you can read, all the better because most boards, signs, bus destinations etc would be written in Hindi. But why would he want to learn to write the language ? That is, unless he has an Indian girlfriend who reads only Hindi.

Learning to write is the last of my priorities when I want to pick up a new language. The first priority is to pick up speaking, followed by mastering how to read the language. Unless it was
a language I learnt at school, I do not bother about learning to write it. I prefer English for anything that requires the written word. Even though I know to write Hindi and my mother tongue Malayalam, it has been years since I wrote even a sentence in either of them.

And with Tamil, which I picked up on my own after moving to Chennai, it took me just a
couple of months (and quite some interaction with my college-mates) to be able to speak
and understand it. Another 4 months saw me working on erasing my Malayalam accent -
it helps to sound like a local wherever you are.

And learning to read Tamil was just a piece of cake, given that all they have is some 18-odd alphabets, which are easy to remember. Compare this to Hindi, Malayalam etc which have
56-odd alphabets to remember. I can read Tamil just as well as someone who learnt it in
school. But when it comes to writing in Tamil, I am clueless because I never felt the need
to learn to write it.

Hindi can be tough (especially the script) for even people from India. And I am sure it is
going to be tougher for someone like our buddy on the train, who must have been exposed
only to the simpler Engish script. Wish him luck though.