Hindustani

**Hindustani** also known as **Hindi-Urdu,** is an Indo-Aryan language, primarily spoken in Northern India and Pakistan, and communities from those countries abroad. By some measurements, it's the 3rd most spoken language in the world. The variety spoken in India is referred to as **Hindi**, and the variety spoken in Pakistan is often referred to as **Urdu**. As an Indo-European language, it is (distantly) related to most European languages, and as such, a lot of its core grammar and phonology is vaguely recognizable to people that speak at least one European language.

## Scripts

Usually, the Devanagari Script is used in India and a variety of the Arabic script, called Nastaliq in Pakistan. Both communities use the Latin alphabet as well, especially online.

## Resources

Hindustani has quite a few resources, most of these teach Hindi, with a minority offering Urdu as well.

### General resources

\* As Hindi

\*\* Community-made courses available as Hindi and Urdu

File:Taj Mahal.jpg
* Learning Hindi- A site with a lot of info on Hindi, and a bit of info about Urdu which unfortunately appears to have been abandoned.
* https://hindilanguage.info/ - Another (unfortunately mostly abandoned) site with a lot of information about Hindi.
* https://www.hindipod101.com/ - Paid courses with audio and text-based learning as well as 1:1 classes.

### YouTube Channels/Videos

 Hindi TV | Channel that uploads lessons daily. Check playlists for more useful courses in chronological order.

## Hindi

### Orthography

A full Devanagari orthographic chart for Modern Standard Hindi is available at https://www.easyhindityping.com/hindi-alphabet along with their Latin equivalents. A lossless transliteration scheme for Hindi is the IAST, but the Hunterian scheme, despite not distinguishing retroflex and dental consonants, is used for general text communication and is the official transliteration medium, since majority of Hindi-speakers do not have knowledge about Devanagari keyboards. Being a phonetically consistent language (i.e. a specific letter is always pronounced the same way no matter where it is used, except for schwa deletion), it is one of the easiest scripts to learn.

Hindi is an abugida language, which means the vowel is attached to a consonant in a secondary manner. Example - क् (k) + ई (ee) = की (kee). This is known as schwa deletion. For online typing, a separate set of "dependent vowels" is available (ा, ि, ो, etc.) which when placed next to a consonant, attaches itself to the consonant to form one single character on selection. The order of letters in the alphabet is arranged so that the source of the sound keeps descending into the speaker's vocal cord.

Without any vowel attached to it, a consonant would make a sound similar to the 'u' in 'such' (अ), except for when it is the last letter in a word, in which case only the sound made by it is pronounced ('k' for 'क' instead of 'ka'), similar to when a 'halant' (्) is attached to it. Letters can also be conjoined to form single letters combining parts of the source letters, for example म् (m) + भ (bha) = म्भ (mbha).

### Gender

Hindi consists of two genders: masculine and feminine. Every noun, pronoun and verb is either one masculine or feminine. A common way of determining the gender of a word is to look for "ee" (ई) syllable at the end or close to the end of the word. If it is there, it is most likely feminine, and otherwise masculine. However, this rule is irrelevant for a lot of words like पानी ("paanii"/"water") which is masculine, and हवा ("hawaa"/"air") which is feminine.

In verbs' cases however, this is always true. If the speaker is a male, he would say "I work." as "मैं काम **करता** हूँ" (Main kaam **kartaa** hoon), and if the speaker is female, she would say "मैं काम **करती** हूँ।" (Main kaam **karti** hoon.) This applies to second- and third-person as well. The only third person pronouns are "वह" (wah) and "वे" (wey).

### Respect verbalization

Almost all Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages have particular forms of politeness that is to be used when referring to a second- or third person. The use and choice of these forms depend on the social relationship between the people in question, and the situation.

Usually, the best example for this word is "you" which has three forms: "तू" (too) which is an impolite form and used when speaking to someone below the speaker's age, "तुम" (tum) which is the regular form and used when speaking to someone of or around the speaker's age, and "आप" (aap) which is the polite form and used when speaking to someone above the speaker's age. This is not a concrete rule: the forms can be used in improper cases, given that the listener is aware of the speaker's speaking habits.

#### Sentence Structure

Hindi is based on the subject-object-verb (SVO) structuring, which means the object in the sentence is placed before the verb. For example:

I **am singing** a song.
मैं गाना **गा रहा**/**रही हूँ**।
In some cases, the order can be shifted around and the sentence would still be valid. Such as:

**This is** truly a wonderful place.
which can be written as either

**यह तो** सचमुच कमाल की जगह है। (*Yeh toh Sachmuch kamaal ki jagah hai.*)
or

सचमुच कमाल की जगह है **यह तो**। (*Sachmuch kamaal ki jagah hai yeh toh.*)
### Media

#### News

 दैनिक जागरण (Dainik Jagran)
 DD News | The first Indian news TV channel; articles on the website available in both English and Hindi

#### Literature

 Mahadevi Verma
 Harivansh Rai Bachchan
 Sharad Joshi

#### Films

Hindi is the main language used in Bollywood and thus there are films with all levels of the language spoken in it. Starting with films of bad scriptwriting is recommended because they use simple form of the language like literary works.

#### Anime/Cartoons

Comics are not officially translated to Hindi (unofficial translations are of course available), but many anime and cartoon shows are available in Hindi dub and transliterated Latin subtitles. Although, original Hindi shows have more accurate dialogues which can convey the verbs and senses perfectly.

* Doraemon
* Tom and Jerry
* Chhota Bheem
* Keymon Ache (might need VPN to access)
* Obocchama-kun
* Gutsy Frog
* Gravity Falls
* Crayon Shinchan
* Mojacko
* Teen Titans Go
* Powerpuff Girls
* Hagemaru
* Luckyman
* Selfie with Bajrangi
* Bandbudh aur Budbak
* Oggy and the Cockroaches
* एक चिड़िया, अनेक चिड़िया (Ek Chidiya, Anek Chidiya)

### Brotips

#### General

* If you're learning the language for mainly spoken contact, you do not have to know even half the language! As an official language of both India and Pakistan, English also has a wide reach, and switching back and forth to Hindi and English is no surprise for communication in both countries.
* If you're learning it for written communication (like chat online), learning the Romanized form is enough. However if you want to officially support the language and its reach, minimize the use of Romanization and stick to Devanagari as far as you can.
* Unlike other popular languages, Hindi has very few good resources available, so the best way to get a good grip on the language without theoretical knowledge is literally just practise on Duolingo etc. and consume Bollywood content (movies, songs, etc.)
* (Ironically?) The clearest slang-ish movies available in Hindi are the ones dubbed from Dravidian languages. As mentioned, they have very bad scriptwriting so they are even easier to understand than authentic Hindi movies.

#### Grammatical

* Look at examples of words in masculine and feminine around you and try to frame sentences with them. Ask yourself, "Do they go together?" When you've looked at enough, you will be able to effortlessly guess which gender a particular word is.
* There are no articles - "a" and "an" can be written as "एक" (ek) which is literally "one", and "the" can be either "वह" (woh) or "उस" (us) based on the sentence.
* Use flash cards - colour specific parts of speech in a sentence in specific colour and keep replacing them as much as the structure supports after which you can use machine translation to find the right words. Using Google Translate is *okay* to a basic extent, but it is strongly discouraged to learn advanced parts of the language with, like cases and tense.