"lie" 1, "love" 0

[modified cross-post from Beth Loves Bollywood]

I'm listening to my Teach Yourself Hindi CD,

just the first bit, with a keen-sounding man pronouncing the 12 vowels and 34 consonants. Much to my delight, the sounds are pretty familiar to me, after 79 movies. (Yes, I have a spreadsheet. I have many a spreadsheet.) And I recognize quite a few of the words he's using as examples, like...well, I feel guilty about writing them out in roman characters now that I have a devanagari font installed and a book right in front of me that says which letter (are they even called letters?) is which sound. Oh, but I don't know how to type with it yet. Ha! Anyway, in addition to "lie" (as in "That's a lie!" Remember, what I know I know from movies), I heard the words for "one," "two," "three," "five," and "friend," among others. But not any of the four words for "love." Isn't there something really great about a language that has at least four words for "love"?

This is fun but a little overwhelming. This is my fifth start of a foreign language (bah! fluency is for the single-minded!) (and I shouldn't count Latin, because after a semester I ran away screaming, and probably breaking my Roman historian father's heart) but the first with a non-roman alphabet. So fun!