Learn Hindi for Travel, Work and Study

Devanagari is written from left to right and hangs from a horizontal line, which is why a page of Hindi looks like washing on a clothesline. It is an alphabet of syllables: each consonant carries an inherent “a” that is changed by small marks above, below or beside it, and there is no distinction between capital and small letters. Thirty-three consonants and eleven vowels cover every sound in the language, so there is no spelling to memorise; the script takes a week or two to read slowly and a few months to read at speed.

The sounds are where English speakers work hardest. Hindi distinguishes a plain consonant from a breathy one — “k” from “kh”, “t” from “th”, “p” from “ph” — and a consonant made against the teeth from one made with the tongue curled back to the roof of the mouth, so that “ṭ” and “t” are different letters and “dāl” (lentils) and “ḍāl” (branch) are different words. There are also nasal vowels, marked with a dot or a crescent, and an “r” that is tapped once. Getting these right is what separates Hindi an Indian understands with ease from Hindi an Indian decodes.

The grammar runs in a different order. The verb comes last — “I water drink” — and the small words that English puts before a noun (in, on, from) come after it as postpositions. Every noun is masculine or feminine, and adjectives and verbs agree with it, so a man and a woman say “I am going” with different endings. The past tense of a transitive verb switches the roles around in a way that takes learners a while to feel natural. On the other side of the ledger, there are no articles, the present tense is regular, and the vocabulary is friendly: Hindi has absorbed thousands of English words and lends many in return.

Respect is graded in the pronoun. “Tū” is for small children, intimate friends and God; “tum” for friends, family and people younger than you; “āp” for everyone else, including parents in many families. The suffix “-jī” after a name or title adds warmth and respect at once — “Sharma-jī”, “mātā-jī” — and the verb agrees with the level chosen, so the choice is heard in every sentence.

For an English speaker Hindi is a middle-distance language. The US Foreign Service Institute allows around 1,100 classroom hours to reach professional working proficiency, which puts it beside Russian and Polish rather than Spanish. Beginners find the first weeks generous — the script yields quickly, polite phrases are short, and English words fill every gap — and the middle stretch long, because the aspirated and retroflex sounds, the gender of nouns and the past tense of transitive verbs all have to become reflexes rather than rules. Understanding fast colloquial Hindi, with its clipped endings and its switches into English mid-sentence, is the last skill to arrive.

How much Hindi a visitor needs depends on where in India they are and whom they talk to. English runs higher education, the courts, the national press and corporate life, and anyone with a college education in the north switches to it readily. Hindi takes over in markets, in autorickshaws, at railway counters outside the big stations, in small towns and villages across the Hindi belt and in conversation with older people. In the south and the north-east Hindi is a second or third language at best, and English or the state language serves better. At work, international companies and the technology sector run in English; a government office in Delhi or Lucknow runs in Hindi. Universities teach almost entirely in English, with Hindi the language of the corridor rather than the lecture hall.

• Yesterday is tomorrow: “Kal” means both yesterday and tomorrow; the verb tense tells you which. “Parsoṅ” is the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow in the same way.
• A hundred numbers to memorise: Hindi numbers from one to a hundred are each their own word — “unnīs” (19), “bīs” (20), “ikkīs” (21) — with no reliable pattern, so even advanced learners count on their fingers. Large numbers go by lakh (100,000) and crore (10 million), written 1,00,000 and 1,00,00,000.
• Words that went west: Shampoo, bungalow, pyjamas, jungle, loot, thug, bangle and veranda all reached English from Hindi or its neighbours.
• The head wobble: A sideways tilt of the head means yes, okay, I understand or go on, depending on speed; it is not the Western shake for no.
• One tongue, two scripts: Spoken Hindi and spoken Urdu are the same everyday language; Hindi is written in Devanagari and draws formal words from Sanskrit, Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script with formal words from Persian and Arabic. The film industry's songs lean towards the Urdu vocabulary.
• “Achchhā” does everything: It means good, but with a rising tone it is “really?”, drawn out it is “I see”, and said quickly twice it is “all right, all right”.

Hindi has no national exam series on the model of DELE or the JLPT, and no Indian visa or residence permit asks for a Hindi level. What exists instead is a small set of credentials learners use when they need one. The Kendriya Hindi Sansthan, the Central Institute of Hindi in Agra, runs certificate, diploma and advanced diploma courses in Hindi for foreign students, many of them on Indian government scholarships, and its diploma is the document most often shown to an employer or a university abroad. In the United States, the ACTFL oral and written proficiency tests rate Hindi on a scale from novice to superior and are the usual route to a formal, dated rating. Universities with Hindi departments outside India issue their own course certificates, levelled to the CEFR in Europe.

Indian citizenship by naturalisation asks for an adequate knowledge of one of the languages listed in the constitution, Hindi among them, with no set exam; the interviewing officer forms a view. Admission to an Indian university is in English and asks for English, not Hindi. For most learners, then, the measure of their Hindi is the one that matters in daily life: whether a shopkeeper in Varanasi answers in Hindi or switches to English.

Two habits make self-study of Hindi work. The first is to learn the script in the first fortnight and then refuse romanised Hindi, because transliteration hides exactly the distinctions — aspirated or plain, dental or retroflex, nasal or not — that the Devanagari letters show. The second is to listen daily to Hindi spoken at natural speed: films, serials and news bulletins are plentiful, subtitled and free, and the ear needs hundreds of hours of them to catch the clipped endings and the English words wearing Hindi grammar.

A tutor earns their fee in Hindi on the sounds and the agreement. No recording tells a learner that their “ṭ” is still a “t”, or that the breath after “kh” is missing, until a Hindi speaker says so, and the gender agreement that runs through every sentence becomes automatic only in conversation with someone who gently repeats the right form. A good tutor also knows which Hindi to teach: the standard of the news bulletin, the Hinglish of the office, or the Urdu-tinted register of the songs.