The Hon'ble President of India, Shri. K.R. Narayanan, released the MS Windows 95/98 version of a self-learning Hindi software - LILA HINDI PRABODH, here today, at the inaugural function of 'Golden Jubilee of Hindi the Official Language of the Union'. The auspicious occasion was also graced by the Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Hon'ble Union Home Minister Shri. Lal Krishna Advani and Hon'ble Minister for State for Home Shri. Ram Naik.

LILA HINDI PRABODH is developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a scientific society of the Department of Electronics (DoE), under the sponsorship of the Department of Official Language (DOL), Ministry of Home Affairs. The software has been designed for the employees of government organizations, Public Sector Undertakings, and for all those who want to learn Hindi from the initial stage. The teacher can also use this package as an effective teaching aid that drastically reduces much of his routine drudgery of evaluating exercises, teaching grammar and narrating texts.

The medium of instruction is English. After the completion of the course, the learner is supposed to achieve a basic functional knowledge of Hindi enough to communicate in simple day-to-day situations. He will also achieve a sound base of written Hindi and its core functional grammar. The constant interactive participation through computer in the self-learning process is likely to give him an extra edge over the skill of reading, writing, speaking and grammar. The two other software under development in this series are LILA-Hindi Praveen and LILA-Hindi Pragya, as next stages of learning Hindi.

LILA HINDI PRABODH contains 37 graded lessons in two CDs and runs on Windows platform. Every lesson has the input of lesson objectives, structure exposure, narrative text, new vocabulary, word family, grammatical notes, structure practice, interactive exercises and evaluation texts with scores. The software also contains an online Hindi-English dictionary. A separate alphabet module has also been provided which enables the learner to familiarize himself with the Devnagari alphabet, mode of writing, words and their pronunciation.

The speech interface provided in the software enables the learner to listen to the standard pronunciation of any narrative text, sentence or word. It also enables him to record his own pronunciation and compare it with the standard pronunciation given in the package. For easy comprehension, every lesson narrative has a video chip running along side the text where the spoken sentences in the text get highlighted in a different color. A pictorial vocabulary module gives the meaning, picture and pronunciation of common words of certain categories.