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Day 5 — How are you — and the आप problem

The idea

Hindi has three words for 'you'. आप is respectful and always safe. तुम is friendly and used with equals and juniors. तू is intimate or insulting depending entirely on the relationship, and a learner should not use it at all for the first year.

Today's task

Do this, not just read it

Use आप with everyone this week. You will occasionally sound over-formal. That is a far smaller error than the alternative.

Words for today

EnglishHindiSounds like
How are you?आप कैसे हैं?aap kaise hain
How are you? (informal)तुम कैसे हो?tum kaise ho
I am fineमैं ठीक हूँmain theek hoon
And you?और आप?aur aap

The mistake to avoid

Watch for this

Copying तू from a film. Film dialogue is written for characters who already know each other.

Where this sits in the thirty days

This is day 5 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 4. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 6 continues from here.

How long today should take

About 23 to 33 minutes if you do the task properly rather than reading past it. Missing a day is not a reason to stop — the sequence matters, the calendar does not.

A note on the Hindi spellings

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.

← Day 4 All 30 days Day 6 →
Practise today's task with a person

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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