ben.atwood.com.au

A while back – say, April – I had a bit of a rant about the first-edition Lonely Planet Bengali phrasebook, and how it used shadhu basha, or high Bangla, where it really should have been using cholti basha, or common Bangla. As indignant and self-righteous as I may have seemed, it looks like I was right (!), because I managed to purchase a third-edition Lonely Planet phrasebook, which now incorporates Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali.

This new edition is a vast improvement, at least from my perspective. Even though it is shorter in length (something of a necessity, to include Hindi and Urdu), it seems to pack in a lot more in the way of phrases one might use – for example, in my travels to Bangladesh, I would not have found the phrase ekhane kothay gari bhara paoa jayo? (where can I hire a car?) useful, unless I were to be suddenly overtaken by suicidal tendencies and decided that I should end my mortal existence by taking driving in Bangladesh into my own hands (for interest’s sake, the above phrase is rendered as ami ekta gari bara korthe chai, which is, I think, could be more closely translated as ‘I would like to hire one car’). However, it would have been handy to ask ingrejite liken? (can you write it in English?), or accha mane ki? (what does ‘accha’ mean?). Though I wouldn’t be able to tell, it looks like Lonely Planet have done a much better job of translating English phrases into cholti basha, as the constructions and words look a lot more familiar to me than those found in the old phrasebook.

Another less noticeable improvement is the rendering of the script. When I went to Bangladesh in 2005, I couldn’t read Bangla script at all, but when I picked it up on my return, I began to notice that the words in the first edition phrasebook were not really translated properly. I can’t be sure if it was a mistake or a printer’s error or what, but there were some words in the Devengari script which just weren’t what was translated into English. Thankfully, the third edition appears to have rectified this.

So, before this becomes an ad for Lonely Planet, I can more highly recommend this phrasebook, not just for travelling in Bangladesh, but also for grappling with the structure of the language. There is a handy introductory section which gives you all the letters of the Bangla alphabet and provides an overview of sentence construction and grammar (not enough for you to start speaking it without the phrasebook, but maybe enough to get you going), and a reasonable dictionary at the back. Two thumbs up!