The Flagship program offers an intensive summer course in elementary and intermediate Hindi for prospective Flagship students with no previous background in Hindi and Urdu. The course takes place during over the entire summer session (June 5 - August 18th) and is held on the main campus of UT-Austin. Admission is open to "summer transients": non-UT students accepted for the summer session.
Current UT undergrads should simply register for the course (HIN 604 in the first summer session & HIN 612 in the second session) and notify the Flagship program via email.
Summer transients should (1) apply for summer admission, (2) register for the course (HIN 604 & 612) and (3) notify the Flagship program via email.
The summer course is an intensive program in Hindi being offered over a relatively short 12 week period. It is designed to make students very well conversant with the Hindi language in the four areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. Adequate familiarity with a fifth element, the culture of Hindi speaking regions, will also be developed. Students are not expected to have any prior knowledge of the language, although, if they do have such knowledge it can only help them. Students will begin with in-depth practice of the Hindi writing system, even as they simultaneously begin to converse in Hindi, first in small phrases and sentences, and progressively, with more complicated expressions.
The students will gain adequate familiarity with the culture, festivals, foods, history, formal and informal ways of speaking with different kinds of people, grammar as well as variations in the language as it is exhibited in different parts of the country. It will be a very hands-on class, where the students will practice what they learn in the morning with a native speaker in the afternoon session. The course material will be carefully chosen and designed by the instructor, and will have plenty of opportunity for understanding contemporary usage of the language in live media. Unlike most other Hindi programs in the country, the course is unique in that it will cover the material not for just one year of Hindi, but in fact two years of Hindi, in the short span of 12 weeks.