EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 3
Hindi numbers are not built from parts — each is its own word. That sounds worse than it is, because you only ever need about thirty of them fluently and the first ten cover most of daily life.
Count to ten aloud five times. Then count backwards, which is much harder and is the test of whether you actually know them.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | एक | ek |
| 2 | दो | do |
| 3 | तीन | teen |
| 4 | चार | chaar |
| 5 | पाँच | paanch |
| 6 | छह | chhah |
| 7 | सात | saat |
| 8 | आठ | aath |
| 9 | नौ | nau |
| 10 | दस | das |
छह (chhah) has an aspirated ch at the start and an h at the end. Both get dropped by beginners, leaving something that sounds like 'cha'.
This is day 3 of 7 in the sounds and script phase (days 1–7), whose job is hearing Hindi accurately and reading Devanagari slowly. It assumes you have done day 2. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 4 continues from here.
About 25 to 35 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. There are 10 new words today. If that is too many, take the first three and leave the rest; 10 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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