Learn Hindi for Free: A Practical Guide for English Speakers

Shampoo, jungle, bungalow, pyjamas, guru, chai and, of course, namaste: if you speak English, a handful of Hindi words, or words that came into English through it, are already yours. That's a pleasant head start for anyone who wants to learn Hindi, and a slightly misleading one. The real work is a new script, verbs that wait at the end of the sentence, and grammar that wants to know your gender before it lets you say "I'm going". None of it is mysterious, and all of it can be started in a month. You can learn Hindi for free in that month too: Qlango is free to start, and Indian public radio and university dictionaries are free online.

Hindi at a glance: हिंदी has well over half a billion speakers counting second-language users, mainly in northern and central India; it is an Indo-Aryan language written in Devanagari

Where Hindi is spoken, and its twin

Hindi is the main language of northern and central India, from Rajasthan and Delhi to Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, and one of the two languages of India's central government, next to English. Several hundred million people speak it as a mother tongue; counting those who use it as a second language, the total is well over half a billion. Outside India you'll meet Hindi, or close relatives of it, in Nepal, Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Suriname, and in the large diaspora in Britain, North America and the Gulf.

It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, which makes it a very distant cousin of English. The resemblance survives in a few old words: नाम (nām) is "name", दो (do) is "two", तीन (tīn) is "three".

Hindi also has a twin. Everyday spoken Hindi and Urdu are close enough that their speakers understand each other without effort. They part ways in writing and in formal vocabulary, where Hindi borrows from Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic. If Pakistan, ghazals or old film songs are part of the attraction, read our guide on how to learn Urdu as well.

Devanagari is the easy part

That sounds backwards, but for most learners it's true. Hindi is written in Devanagari, left to right, with letters hanging from a line along the top. Every consonant carries a built-in "a", and the other vowels are small marks attached above, below or beside it: क is ka, कि is ki, की is kī, कु is ku. The alphabet is arranged by where in the mouth each sound is made, and spelling follows pronunciation far more faithfully than English does.

Two things catch beginners. The mark for short i is written before its consonant but pronounced after it, so कि looks like "i-k" and reads "ki". And the built-in "a" often goes silent at the end of a word: नाम is written nā-ma and said nām. With twenty minutes a day, two weeks is a realistic time to read slowly and correctly.

Devanagari vowel marks on one consonant: क ka, कि ki (the mark is written before but said after), की kī, कु ku, and नाम nām where the final a goes silent

The sounds English doesn't separate

Hindi distinguishes sounds that English treats as one. These pairs matter most:

Letters	The difference	Examples
त and ट	t with the tongue on the teeth, and t with the tongue curled back	तीन (tīn, three), टमाटर (ṭamāṭar, tomato)
द and ड	the same contrast for d	दो (do, two), डर (ḍar, fear)
क and ख	plain k, and k with a puff of air	काना (kānā, one-eyed), खाना (khānā, food)
ज and झ	plain j, and j with a puff of air	जल (jal, water), झील (jhīl, lake)

English t and d fall between the two Hindi versions, and Hindi speakers hear them as the curled-back ones, which goes a long way to explaining the Indian English accent. The puff of air matters more than learners expect: drop it from khānā and you've asked for something one-eyed for dinner.

Why grammar slows people down when they learn Hindi

Gender reaches everything

Every noun is masculine or feminine, and adjectives and verbs agree with it. पानी (pānī, water) is masculine although it ends in ī, usually a feminine ending; चाय (chāy, tea) is feminine. So "the water is cold" is पानी ठंडा है (pānī ṭhanḍā hai) and "the tea is cold" is चाय ठंडी है (chāy ṭhanḍī hai). Your own gender counts as well: a man says मैं जाता हूँ (main jātā hūn) for "I go", a woman says मैं जाती हूँ (main jātī hūn).

Hindi gender endings ṭhanḍā (masculine) and ṭhanḍī (feminine): पानी ठंडा है pānī ṭhanḍā hai (the water is cold), चाय ठंडी है chāy ṭhanḍī hai (the tea is cold), and a woman says मैं जाती हूँ main jātī hūn (I go)

The verb comes last

The order is subject, object, verb, and the little words English puts before a noun come after it: घर में (ghar mein) is "in the house", literally "house in".

The past tense has a twist

With verbs that take an object, the past tense marks the subject with ने (ne) and makes the verb agree with the object instead. मैंने खाना खाया (mainne khānā khāyā) is "I ate food"; मैंने रोटी खाई (mainne roṭī khāī) is "I ate a roti", and the verb changes because roṭī is feminine. Whether a man or a woman did the eating makes no difference. It feels strange for a few weeks and then stops feeling like anything.

Three ways to say "you"

तू (tū) is very intimate and can be rude, तुम (tum) is for friends and family, and आप (āp) is for everyone else. Start with āp and you won't offend anybody.

First words worth learning

नमस्ते (namaste): hello and goodbye, with or without folded hands
धन्यवाद (dhanyavād): thank you, slightly formal; शुक्रिया (shukriyā) is just as common in speech
हाँ (hān) and नहीं (nahīn): yes and no; the final n only makes the vowel nasal
ठीक है (ṭhīk hai): OK, fine, agreed
आप कैसे हैं? (āp kaise hain?): how are you?, to a man; to a woman, आप कैसी हैं? (āp kaisī hain?)
मेरा नाम ... है (merā nām ... hai): my name is ...
माफ़ कीजिए (māf kījie): excuse me, sorry
मुझे थोड़ी हिंदी आती है (mujhe thoṛī hindī ātī hai): I know a little Hindi, literally "a little Hindi comes to me"

How to learn Hindi in your first month

Plan for twenty to thirty minutes a day. Little and often beats a weekend binge.

Week 1: vowels and the first consonants. Learn the vowels and about half the consonants, and read short words aloud every day. Writing them by hand makes them stick faster.
Week 2: the rest of the alphabet and your first sentences. Finish the consonants, learn the phrases above and the numbers to ten, and the present tense of "to be": मैं हूँ (main hūn), आप हैं (āp hain), वह है (vah hai).
Week 3: gender and word order. Learn forty everyday nouns together with their gender, and put them into sentences with में (mein, in), पर (par, on) and से (se, from or with).
Week 4: talk about yourself. Write five short sentences a day about yourself, read them aloud, and ask a Hindi speaker or another learner to correct them.

At the end of the month you'll be partway through A1 on the CEFR scale. That isn't conversation yet, but Hindi will have stopped being noise.

How can you learn Hindi for free?

Start with Qlango. Download it free on Android or iOS, or open it in your browser, choose the language you learn through, and take your first A1 lesson, which takes about five minutes. It's free to start, and the first lessons pair Devanagari with sound from day one.

Then add these free resources:

Akashvani News: the news service of All India Radio publishes its Hindi bulletins, such as Samachar Prabhat in the morning, as audio on its website, with an archive of transcripts. Listening while you read along is ideal practice once Devanagari feels familiar.
Digital Dictionaries of South Asia: the University of Chicago's free collection includes several Hindi dictionaries, among them McGregor's Hindi-English dictionary, with one search across all of them.
Older US government courses: the Foreign Service Institute and the Peace Corps both produced Hindi courses that are now in the public domain and free to download from archive sites. They're dated, but the drills still work.

Start with Qlango and the script. Bring in the radio bulletins when you can read a sentence without stopping at every letter, and keep the dictionaries open for the words the bulletins repeat.

How Qlango helps

Qlango teaches Hindi at A1, A2 and B1. B1 is the level where you can handle most situations on a trip and talk about your experiences and plans. Lessons are short, and while Devanagari is still new you can show a Latin transliteration under the words, then hide it once you read the script on your own. Building sentences yourself is where verb-last word order becomes automatic, and spaced repetition brings each word back just before you would forget it.

When you add the course, you choose the language you learn through: English, or another language you know well. Hindi is free to start, and Premium adds offline lessons and an AI teacher you can ask about any grammar point, such as why खाई changed its ending. Every course and level is listed on the languages page.

Keep the transliteration switched on through the first lessons; it's there to be outgrown. Give Devanagari its two weeks, with Qlango's A1 course running alongside, and नमस्ते will be a word you read rather than one you remember from a yoga class.

Is there an app to learn Hindi?

Yes. Qlango teaches Hindi from A1 to B1 on iPhone, Android and the web, and it’s free to start.

Comparing apps? Read our guide to the best language learning apps or see the Duolingo alternatives.