Heyo ✨

Heyo ✨

I was wondering - what is your native language? And if you have any advice for someone starting to learn hindi? :) would really appreciate it a lot ✨love your blog and the whole concept :)

Hi there!

My native language is Finnish. So I am just a learner and very humble about whatever knowledge or understanding I may possess about Hindi - it's a long journey and I am far from fluency!

Some advice for beginners... lets see:

Learn Devanagari!

Is it absolutely necessary? Perhaps not but it's so beautiful and it makes learning pronunciation a heck of a lot easier when you can just, well, read the way words are meant to be said. मोती (a pearl) and मोटी (fat, feminine) for example are two very different things even if in the Latin alphabet both would be written as moti.

To practice the script you can use Duolingo app or practice books such as Taneja (2012) Practice Makes Perfect: Basic Hindi (also available as an ebook). Even if you wouldn't need to write by hand in real-life situations, I've found practising hand-eye-coordination somehow helps to internalise the script and the sounds letters represent.

Basic grammar

Hindi is a subject-object-verb (SOV) language and remembering that helps a long way. Learn your personal pronouns and basic verb conjugations (they are super regular and there are only a handful of irregular verbs!) and the rest will follow. For this, I recommend grammar books which there are several good ones (you can see my post about some of them) and most of them are available as ebooks.

Vocabulary

This is probably the trickiest part and only because there are so. many. words. and they come from so many languages (which may or may not affect how the word behaves grammatically) - you will notice soon enough that you know 4 or 5 synonyms for 'but' or 'and' before you learn enough words to even need a connecting word for two sentences.

Here my advice is that first learn the basic rules for feminine and masculine noun declension, and then just start hoarding your vocabulary. Listen, read, watch all kinds of different material. Latest films, tweets, news clips, old films, poetry, children's books... and you will find out what are the over-arching most commonly used structures and words. You will also inevitably gather dozens of synonyms and rare words you probably won't need ever again but hey, that's also part of the Hindi journey - think of them as the flowers growing alongside your path that you stop to marvel from time to time.

Here's some links too:

Language Curry - a free iOS and Android app for basic grammar and vocabulary, doesn't require the knowledge of Devanagari.

Hindilanguage.info - a website explaining Hindi grammar

Wiktionary - absolutely the best place to check for conjugation and declension tables for a beginner

@salvadorbonaparte's MEGA folder with study resources for all things linguistic and languages, including Hindi

Basic Hindi I - an open-access online book for learning Hindi

A door into Hindi - another free access online resource structured like a grammar book. It's a bit dated though, not sure if audio / video still works, but texts, grammar and vocab are still very valid.

Hope this helps. Enjoy your learning!