EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 21
The past is where Hindi gets structurally interesting. मैं गया — I went. Straightforward. Tomorrow's lesson is the part that is not.
Convert ten present-tense sentences you can already say into the past.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| to go | जाना | jaana |
| to come | आना | aana |
| to eat | खाना | khaana |
| to sleep | सोना | sona |
Assuming the past will be as regular as the present. It is not, and the next lesson is why.
This is day 7 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 20. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 22 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.
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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