EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 16
Every Hindi noun is masculine or feminine, and the adjective and verb agree. किताब is feminine, घर is masculine, and there is no reliable rule. From today, learn every new noun WITH its gender. Retrofitting it later takes ten times as long.
Go back through every noun you have learnt and label it. Most learners discover they have twenty untagged words already.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| book (f) | किताब | kitaab |
| house (m) | घर | ghar |
| girl (f) | लड़की | ladki |
| boy (m) | लड़का | ladka |
| tea (f) | चाय | chaay |
Deciding to 'do gender later'. This is the single most expensive delay in Hindi, and everyone makes it.
This is day 2 of 8 in the grammar that carries weight phase (days 15–22), whose job is gender, postpositions and the present tense working together. It assumes you have done day 15. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 17 continues from here.
About 25 to 35 minutes if you do the task properly rather than reading past it. There are 5 new words today. If that is too many, take the first three and leave the rest; 5 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.
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