Language Learning Resource

Language Facts: 

• The first step to learn Bengali is to learn the alphabet. Bengali uses an abugida (where all the letters are consonants and vowels are additional markings). A distinguishing feature of the writing system is the top horizontal line connecting letters called matra মাত্রা .
• There are four noun cases, which is much less than some languages like Finnish. Which words are declined into specific cases are affected by animacy, which complicates it a bit.  
• All counted nouns must have a measure word, like in Chinese, and learning which measure words go to which nouns is not optional. 
• Bengali uses postpositions, as opposed to the prepositions in English 
•  The third person pronouns change based on three levels of proximity ( close and part of the discussion, present but not part of the discussion, and not present). Pronouns have no gender. Pronouns have several levels of politeness and familiarity. 
•  Basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb.