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Why you are not a beginner, and why being taught as one wastes months.
If you grew up with Hindi at home and cannot speak it, you have a specific and very common profile: high comprehension, low production, decent pronunciation instincts, and no grammar you could describe. You are not a beginner and you should refuse to be taught as one.
Being started at the alphabet and नमस्ते is the standard mistake, and it is demoralising as well as slow — you spend weeks on material you have known since childhood while the actual gap goes untouched.
The actual gap is production under pressure, plus the grammar you absorbed without learning: gender, which you often get right by ear and cannot explain; the ने construction; and the endings that shift with formality. A good course for you is almost entirely speaking, with grammar explained retroactively to systematise what you half-know.
Say this in a first lesson, in exactly these words: "I understand nearly everything and I cannot speak." A tutor who hears it will restructure the whole course, and one who does not is the wrong tutor.
There is often an emotional layer too — impatience with yourself, and sometimes embarrassment in front of relatives. It is worth naming. Nobody taught you. You are not recovering from a failure.
Reading gets you the grammar. Speaking is the part that only happens with another human. EkGuru tutors are native Hindi speakers in India who teach one to one over video — no group classes, no subscription.
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