EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 20
Two words matter more than the rest: तीखा (chilli-hot) and मसालेदार (well-spiced). They are not the same thing, and confusing them gets you either a bland meal or one you cannot eat.
Order something out loud in Hindi, even if only to yourself, before you have to do it for real.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| I am hungry | मुझे भूख लगी है | mujhe bhookh lagi hai |
| Water, please | पानी दीजिए | paani deejiye |
| Not spicy, please | तीखा मत बनाइए | teekha mat banaaiye |
| I am vegetarian | मैं शाकाहारी हूँ | main shaakaahaari hoon |
| The bill, please | बिल दीजिए | bill deejiye |
Asking for 'no masala'. You want no तीखा. मसाला is flavour and removing it removes the food.
This is day 6 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 19. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 21 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.
Days 21 to 30 cover the past tense, ने and real-speed listening. Those three are the ones that self-study reliably gets wrong, because you cannot hear your own errors. An hour a week is enough to stop them setting.
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