Learn Hindi Words

Devanagari with romanisation underneath — for people who already understand.

Understanding Hindi without reading it

A very large number of people can follow a Hindi conversation, or a film without subtitles, and still cannot read a road sign. Television, family and music teach the ear long before anyone teaches the eye. If that describes you, you are not starting from zero — you are starting from the middle, and the missing piece is the script.

Every Hindi word here appears in Devanagari with a romanised spelling beneath it: पानी with pānī. Play from the romanisation for as long as you need. The shapes stop looking foreign faster than you expect, simply from seeing them next to words you already know.

Devanagari is regular, which helps

Unlike English, Hindi spelling largely matches its sound. A letter keeps its value, vowels attach to consonants as marks above, below or beside them, and the horizontal line along the top ties a word together. Once the system clicks, sounding out a new word is mechanical rather than a guess.

The part that takes time is the conjunct consonants — two or three letters fused into one shape. There are a lot of them, and they are the reason reading stays slow for a while after the basics are done. That is normal, not a sign you are failing.

Sounds that English does not have

Hindi distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated consonants — the difference between a k with a puff of air and one without. English speakers hear them as the same sound, so they need pointing out, and romanisation can only hint at them. This is one place where listening to a native speaker is not optional.

Which words to learn first

You will notice that some words have a formal and an everyday version — धन्यवाद and शुक्रिया both mean thank you, and चुप्पी sits beside more colloquial alternatives. Both are correct; the formal ones turn up in writing, the everyday ones in speech.

Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi

Spoken Hindi and Urdu overlap enormously at the everyday level — much of a normal conversation is shared, with the vocabulary diverging as the register becomes more formal. The scripts, however, are entirely different. Punjabi is a separate language with its own script, though anyone who speaks one will recognise a great deal in the others.

For children growing up abroad

Set "I speak" to English or German and leave the target on Hindi. Ten words a day is small enough that a child will actually finish it, and the example sentences give them a full line to say rather than a single word to recognise. That difference — saying versus recognising — is where the language is either kept or quietly lost.

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