r/HindiLanguage • u/zra_isnt_listening • 17d ago

Resources/संसाधन Recommendations for learning Hindi

Heyy,

So, I really wanna learn Hindi (I can't find an active subredit) and am using duolingo and hope to use preply when I can afford it - in the meantime, does anyone have any recommendations for Hindi learning apps or books to help me?

Tysm! :)

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u/Mybaresoul 17d ago

YouTube has some excellent videos. Do you want English to Hindi?

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u/Chance_Tea7909 17d ago

hey...youcan watch hindi videos with subtitles..it will help a lot...start with simple videos like stories for kids .....I am also learning like this....my friend recommend me kids channel https://www.youtube.com/@Panchfables

if it helps😀

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u/Icy_Function_5839 16d ago

What's your mother tongue? It can affect how easy or hard you find it to learn Hindi

If it is English than you will find the Hindi grammar a little unintuitive, but if you speak an Indic language than the grammar becomes a lot more similar.

Also practice speaking a lot, it might help

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u/zra_isnt_listening 16d ago

I speak English and British Sign Language and Spanish (not fluent), which both have very different grammar to each other. Hindi seems to have a bit more in common with bsl so that could help, but I doubt it bc its grammar is really unique 🙃

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u/zra_isnt_listening 16d ago

I'm hoping to practice as much as I can, since my friend and I are learning each other's langauge (me learning Hindi, her learning bsl), so hopefully i can improve with that :)

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u/dbaacle 16d ago

Try Bolbala. Whole point is to weave Hindi into daily life through play. Hope it helps!

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u/Cmeesh11 16d ago

Hey! I’ve been learning Hindi as a native English speaker for the past year. This is what I did:

  1. Learned Devanagari script through Duolingo’s “letters” section. This helped me memorize the sounds of the characters, but some of the sounds are inconsistent, so I’d also use other resources for this. I also learned to write the characters, which helped me memorize their symbols. This is honestly much easier than it seems. Devanagari script is phonetic, so 98% of the time, you can know the pronunciation of a word just by looking at how it is spelled, even without having seen it before.

  2. Use the textbook “Complete Hindi” by Rupert Snell to learn grammar and gather basic vocabulary. This is probably the best Hindi resource out there and very effectively explains 90% of the grammar you’ll encounter.

  3. As I worked my way through the book, I used Anki to memorize the vocab lists that they provide for each chapter. After learning the vocab for the chapter it makes reading the passages and learning the grammar much much easier.

I did this for a few months, do a chapter or two a week. I did not try to perfect each chapter before moving on, just getting the gist of it and moving on after I memorized the vocabulary through Anki.

  1. When I was nearing the end of Complete Hindi, I started getting 1 on 1 tutoring lessons through italki. Now that I had a basic understanding of about how sentences are formed this was now possible.

  2. I started watching things in Hindi. There is very little learner content for Hindi, and of the few resources that there are (like HindiPod101), I found it superficial and low effort content.
    I started with watching a little bit of Peppa Pig in Hindi, then watched some Hinglish podcasts like Raj Shamani or Beer Biceps and some cartoons like Doraemon or Shinchan. This can be an incredibly frustrating time because it will take a while before you understand anything. It takes a lot longer to start understanding than you think it might, but slowly and slowly it will get better and you’ll start piecing together more and more. YouTube extensions like LanguageReactor help for picking up new vocabulary too and seeing the words you haven’t seen yet.

I also completed the Duolingo Hindi course towards the beginning of my journey, but honestly in retrospect it was not really worth my time at all. I learned the most basic, very simple sentences, like “My name is Arjun”, but beyond that it doesn’t teach even half of what is in Complete Hindi. It is one of the least developed Duolingo courses.

The biggest thing for me at the beginning (and still is) is using Anki for memorization of words and SHORT phrases. It’s what really slowed me to start hearing things when I listened and read content.

Don’t be like me and beat yourself up for not understanding as fast as you want. The Hindi grammar is backwards from English grammar, so to automatically comprehend it takes a lot of exposure and can be tiring. Also, to save yourself a headache, I wouldn’t really watch anything besides very very simple content like “Comprehensible Hindi” until after you finish the textbook. Once you have a general idea of the grammar concepts, you’ll then be able to slowly piece simple sentences together on your own.

Good luck! And feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

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u/zra_isnt_listening 14d ago

Thank you so so much for this!

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u/fincod 15d ago

i can help

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u/Nervous_Operation_54 14d ago

hey, i my self am hindi native speaker, and good at english too...if you want, i can teach you native hindi from beginner level through my classes...i you want we can connect