EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 10
Every consonant already contains an 'a'. क is 'ka', not 'k'. To change the vowel you attach a matra: का, कि, की, कु, कू. To remove it entirely you add a halant underneath: क्. This one fact explains most beginner confusion about Devanagari.
Take क and write all eleven vowel forms. Then do it with म. You now have twenty-two syllables you can read.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| the u in 'but' — short and neutral | अ | a |
| the a in 'father' — held longer | आ (का) | aa |
| the i in 'sit' | इ (कि) | i |
| the ee in 'see' | ई (की) | ee |
| the u in 'put' | उ (कु) | u |
| the oo in 'boot' | ऊ (कू) | oo |
Reading क as a bare k and wondering why words look longer than they sound.
This is day 3 of 7 in the first sentences phase (days 8–14), whose job is saying true things about yourself without assembling them word by word. It assumes you have done day 9. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 11 continues from here.
About 30 to 40 minutes if you do the task properly rather than reading past it. Script days are slower than they look: recognising a letter takes a few seconds, writing it takes a minute, and the writing is what makes the recognition stick. There are 6 new words today. If that is too many, take the first three and leave the rest; 6 half-known words are worth less than three you can produce. 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.
Find a Hindi Guru Free Hindi guides