EkGuru › Learn Hindi › Daily Hindi › Day 6
Devanagari's order is a map of your mouth, starting at the back. क ख ग घ ङ are all made in the same place with five different settings: plain, aspirated, voiced, voiced-aspirated, nasal. Learn that pattern once and the next four groups follow it exactly.
Write each letter five times. Physically writing them, badly, does more for recognition than looking at them does.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| k as in 'skin' — no puff of air | क | ka |
| k with a strong puff of air, as in 'kite' | ख | kha |
| g as in 'go' | ग | ga |
| g with breath behind it — no English equivalent | घ | gha |
| ng as in 'sing'; never starts a word | ङ | nga |
Trying to learn the letters in alphabetical order as an English-style list. The grouping IS the lesson.
This is day 6 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 5. It sits in the middle of the phase, which is where most of the actual learning happens and where most people quietly stop. Day 7 continues from here.
About 30 to 40 minutes if you do the task properly rather than reading past it. Script days are slower than they look: recognising a letter takes a few seconds, writing it takes a minute, and the writing is what makes the recognition stick. 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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