It's easy to roar with laughter about some features of this colonial work, intended to prepare Britisher officers for the advanced Hindustani (ie standard spoken Hindi minus much of the tatsama vocab) test.

For instance, "All my horses have bushy tales." I'll let you find the page for that one.

But, many of those guys also knew their languages really well, and even their "simplified" works would now be considered advanced. Then again, tourists in India don't really need Hindi, and Indian elites are not known to cultivate their own languages these days (with the possible exception of Bengalis and Tamils). Time for the real bhaktas to hold onto their 19th c. books, or even older palm-leaves!

Read page 17/18, the very beginning, and you'll see that details of idiom are crucial, and you would need to dig around a lot in many other books to find those neat distinctions. I for one have certainly learned a lot from this book. Actually liking or admiring British officers, who destroyed Old Delhi so brutally, is not among that "lot", of course. But I digress...