Learning to write a phrase in Hindi

My wonderful wife wrote a gracious message on my Facebook wall for Father’s day. In her message she mentioned, “joie de vivre.” Not knowing what this phrase means, I headed over to one of my favorite resources on the internet, Google Translate.

The default language for translations—for some reason on my Google—was set to Hindi. A bunch of foreign characters popped up, जीने की खुशी (foreign to me, not to others)

I quickly changed them to my language, English.

Joy of living! How wonderful!

Those Hindi words were intriguing, so I went back to them. Lo and behold the speakers of Google Translate can speak in Hindi. AWESOME.

How is “joy of living” pronounced in Hindi? Answer: jeene kee khushee

Since I’m all about learning words in other languages through repetition, I recorded a screencast of me hitting the play button twenty times. For those wishing to learn how to say “joy of living” in Hindi, listen to the Youtube video, “joie de vivre” in Hindi 20 times“

Ok, so that phrase is incredible to say out loud.
jeene kee khushee
jeene kee khushee

But now I wish to learn how to write जीने की खुशी.

I have absolutely no idea what Hindi characters are based from. They look like nothing I know. I don’t even know if the phrase is written left to right or right to left. But it would be so cool to literally memorize all the shapes together. Decoded, these string of shapes would translate into joy of living.

Since I don’t know how the letters are properly formed, I took screenshots of this phrase in various fonts. And because I love to blow up bitmapped text from a screen, here they are large. Maybe I’ll print them out at work and hang up in my cube.

Update

I hung up the print out at my work desk.

The font used is Devanagari Sangam MN. If you’d like to print your own, here’s a PDF.