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Every Hindi topic, mapped

34 topics, each with a page that explains it properly and links to every guide, question, answer and tool on the site about it. This is the map: start anywhere and you can always see what comes next.

34topics
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Learning Hindi from absolutely nothing

Where to start, in what order, and what to ignore for now. · 7 pages

Devanagari, letter by letter

44 letters, why they are ordered the way they are, and how the vowel marks work. · 7 pages

How Hindi actually sounds

Aspiration, retroflex consonants, and the four-way distinctions English speakers cannot hear at first. · 3 pages

How long Hindi takes to learn — the honest answer

Why nobody can give you an honest single number, and what actually determines it. · 9 pages

The system

How Hindi is put together

Word order, postpositions, gender agreement and the one construction that defeats self-study. · 6 pages

The verb system, without the fog

Three tenses, gender agreement, and the noun-plus-करना trick that gives you hundreds of expressions free. · 2 pages

Building a Hindi sentence

Verb last, postpositions after, and how to stop translating from English in your head. · 3 pages

Which words to learn, and in what order

The first thousand words, where they come from, and the free vocabulary your own language may already give you. · 7 pages

आप, तुम and तू

Three levels of 'you', and the cost of choosing wrong. · 4 pages

The four skills

Getting words out of your mouth

Why production is the bottleneck, and why it is the one thing you cannot do alone. · 3 pages

Understanding Hindi at real speed

Why comprehension lags behind everything else, and the only thing that fixes it. · 3 pages

From sounding out to actually reading

The stages between knowing the letters and reading a sentence without effort. · 4 pages

Handwriting and typing Devanagari

Stroke order, the top line, and why typing is not the same as writing. · 4 pages

Actually talking to someone

What a real conversation needs that a phrasebook cannot give you, and how to survive your first one. · 5 pages

Situations

Saying hello properly

When namaste is right, when it is oddly formal, and what people actually say. · 8 pages

The Hindi that actually helps on a trip

Autos, trains, bargaining and the phrases that change how you are treated. · 3 pages

Ordering, refusing and enjoying food in Hindi

The two spice words that are not the same, and why refusing food once does not work. · 2 pages

Prices, bargaining and Indian numbers

Catching a price said at speed, and knowing when bargaining is expected. · 2 pages

Counting in Hindi

Why they are harder than they look, the pattern that saves you, and lakh and crore. · 4 pages

Days, months and telling the time

The seven days and their planets, the month names, and the two clock times that follow no rule. · 7 pages

The Hindi you hope not to need

Short, unambiguous phrases for medical, police and lost-and-stranded situations. · 2 pages

People and life

Kinship terms, and why there are so many

Hindi has separate words for relations English lumps together — and there is a reason. · 3 pages

Talking to a partner, and to their family

The register question, meeting parents, and why the film version is not the spoken one. · 2 pages

Professional Hindi

What is actually spoken in an Indian workplace, and why the textbook register is the wrong one. · 1 page

Teaching Hindi to a child

What works at different ages, and the reason a bilingual child answers you in English. · 1 page

When you grew up hearing it

Why you are not a beginner, and why being taught as one wastes months. · 4 pages

Culture and comparison

Hindi through Bollywood

What films are genuinely good for, what they are bad for, and how to use them without wasting hours. · 3 pages

The words nobody teaches you

यार, अच्छा, बस and the small words that carry a conversation. · 3 pages

The way Hindi is actually spoken in cities

Code-switching is not broken Hindi, and pretending otherwise makes you harder to understand. · 3 pages

Hindi and Urdu: one spoken language, two scripts

Two scripts, two vocabularies, one spoken language. · 3 pages

Hindi vs Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Sanskrit and the rest

Which Indian languages are close relatives, which are not related at all, and what that means for a learner. · 2 pages

Getting it to stick

The errors learners actually make

The ones that fossilise, in the order they cost you most. · 3 pages

How to actually remember words

Spaced repetition, what it is good at, and the point at which it stops helping. · 5 pages

Writing a name in Devanagari

Transliteration, not translation — and why there is often more than one correct answer. · 3 pages

How to use this

Most learning sites are a pile of articles with a search box. The problem with a pile is that you cannot tell what you have not covered. A map tells you. If you can see that you have read four pages under "The system" and none under "The four skills", that is a genuinely useful thing to know about your own learning.

Each topic page is written to stand on its own — it is not an index with a sentence at the top. Read it, then follow the links underneath into the specific guides, questions and tools on that topic.

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