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About Bengali

Although Bengali is one of the largest in the world in terms of speakers, very few people in Western Europe seem to have discovered it. Some of the greatest gems of the world's literature have been created in Bengali, much of this by Rabindranath Tagore, who is generally considered the Greatest of all Bengali writers.

One difficulty in learning the language for most learners is the use of the Bengali version of the Devanagari script which is considerably less easy to learn and to master than are alphabets of the European type. But the script is elegant and aesthetically pleasing (I think) and adds an extra dimension to the learning of the language. Good fonts for use on PCs are beginning to appear.
AkashNY.com have produced a nicely designed Bengali font for Windows.
www.bengali.org also have a very good Bengali font for Windows, which is also web-compatible.

An unusually good textbook of Bengali exists in English: William Radice: Bengali. A Complete Course for Beginners. London 1994: Hodder and Stoughton (Teach Yourself Books, ISBN 0-340-55257-3 (paperback)).

Below are some links to pages dealing with Bengali:

"Virtual Bangladesh's Homepage"
Suhas Ghosh has a page full of Bengali links

This page was last updated November 16, 2004.

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