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Word order, postpositions, gender agreement and the one construction that defeats self-study.
Hindi grammar has a reputation for difficulty that is only half deserved. Three features are genuinely new to an English speaker and one of them is genuinely hard.
Word order is subject-object-verb. मैं चावल खाता हूँ is literally 'I rice eat am'. This feels alien for about a month and then stops being a problem, because it is completely consistent — there is no exception to learn.
Postpositions replace prepositions and sit after the noun: घर को, house-to. Again mechanically simple and completely regular. Speakers of German, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and the Indian languages find both of these features already familiar.
Grammatical gender is where the work is. Every noun is masculine or feminine, adjectives agree, and — unlike Spanish or French — the verb agrees too. Your own gender appears in your verbs in every sentence you speak. There is no reliable rule for guessing a noun's gender, so it must be learned with the noun, from day one.
And then there is ने. In the perfective form of a transitive verb, the subject takes ने and the verb agrees with the object instead of the subject. मैंने किताब पढ़ी — the verb is feminine because किताब is, whoever is speaking. This is split ergativity. The rule is one sentence long and the exceptions are the whole subject, which is why self-taught learners reliably fossilise a wrong version of it.
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