Tej Bhatia's Colloquial Hindi course

I borrowed this course from the library. There's a book and two CDs. It's okay but not excellent.
The book is interestingly written but it annoys me that some of the early lessons only give the romanizations and not the Hindi script. The least you could do is to print both, particularly in the pronunciation lessons where it would be quite nice to be able to connect the sound to the Devanagari letter.

The CD's I don't care for that much. I like the dialogues, but the exercises aren't that good pedagogically. In my opinion a language course CD should be suited to listening to over and over again, and this one isn't. There are some exercises that it's kind of pointless to repeat when you remember the answers from the last time. Too many questions and instructions are given in English when Hindi would do. The English narrator insists on telling me the life stories of everyone in the dialogues in long-winded English even though there is no need to know their names and their professional background to understand what's going on in the dialogue. I think most people who listen to language courses are intelligent enough to figure out that you can pause the tape and listen to difficult passages again without being reminded about it over and over again.  The narrator tells us some stuff that is in the book and there's really no need to hear it on the CD again.

There is simply far too much blah blah blah in English, and it gets annoying on repeated listening. I feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm listening to a person talking English to me when I wanted a Hindi course.