EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 1
Before any word, hear the language. Hindi distinguishes four sounds where English has one: क (k, no air), ख (k with air), ग (g), घ (g with air). Hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth and say them — it should move for ख and घ and not for क and ग. This is not a detail. It is the difference between being understood and being nearly understood, forever.
Say each of the four aloud ten times with the paper. Then say नमस्ते slowly: na-mas-te, three equal syllables, no swallowed vowel at the end.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Hello / greetings | नमस्ते | namaste |
| Hello (more formal) | नमस्कार | namaskaar |
| Yes | हाँ | haan |
| No | नहीं | nahin |
Saying na-mas-tay with an English diphthong. The Hindi ए is a pure vowel with no y glide at the end.
This is day 1 of 7 in the sounds and script phase (days 1–7), whose job is hearing Hindi accurately and reading Devanagari slowly. Nothing here assumes anything. If you have never seen Devanagari, this is the right place to start. Day 2 continues from here.
About 23 to 33 minutes if you do the task properly rather than reading past it. The speaking part is not optional decoration — saying it aloud badly is worth more than reading it correctly, because your mouth learns nothing from your eyes. Missing a day is not a reason to stop — the sequence matters, the calendar does not.
Devanagari is easy to get slightly wrong when it is typed by hand — a missing matra, the wrong nukta. If something here looks off to you, trust a native speaker over this page and please tell us so it gets fixed — it takes a moment and a real person reads it. Romanised spellings are a guide to the sound, not a standard: there is no single official way to write Hindi in Latin letters.
Today's task is a speaking task. Doing it alone is better than not doing it, and doing it with someone who corrects you is worth about five times as much.
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