Two months of Bengali lessons with Sakhicharan and Bisakha came to a conclusion today with the last chapter of the textbook discussions finished. William Radice's "Teach Yourself Bengali" turned out to be a decent and thorough textbook, even if I would have personally wanted to see simple past tense and conditional sentences dealt with a bit earlier on.

In what turned out to be a pretty intense crash course of what came to around a total of a bit over 50 hours of teaching, we covered the whole of Bangla grammar and the 15 or so discussions in the text along with a good number of other practical and useful applications of the language. I guess people usually spend a lot more time on covering the whole of Bengali grammar than we did!

Some of the textbook exercises we did together, and many more we skipped. On some days I was reading from books of their choice and translating with brief explanations of why things were said the way they are. We could have used more time for discussion practice. I imagine they'll be digesting all that information for a while!

The period also left me with much useful experience; for one, I finally got to the bottom of the grammar myself and familiarized myself with related terminology once again, and perhaps properly for the first time. Assets that'll undoubtedly come in handy when I move on with my studies of Hindi and Sanskrit.

This is actually the first time I've ever taught a language to anyone. No doubt one could have spent much more time in preparing a proper curriculum and exercises tailored better to the environment the language is applied in. But then again, to justify going to such lengths one would need to have a plan for more than a single short course. For this situation, the second part of Radice's work featuring discussions and grammar was quite sufficient.