EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Chinese
Your first language decides which parts of Hindi are easy and which are slow, and almost no course takes account of it. This page does. It is written for someone who already speaks Chinese and wants to know what that is worth before spending a year finding out.
Mandarin is broadly subject-verb-object, so Hindi's verb-final order is new. Mandarin's topic-comment structure does, however, allow the object to be fronted with 把, and that is a small piece of preparation.
Two things. Hindi is not tonal, which removes the hardest feature of your own language from the equation entirely — an enormous relief that Mandarin speakers learning most languages do not get to enjoy. And Mandarin's lack of inflection means you have no wrong habits to unlearn; you are building from a clean base rather than transferring a conflicting system.
Inflection itself, which is the whole of the work. Mandarin marks almost nothing on the word — no gender, no number agreement, no verb conjugation. Hindi marks gender, number and formality on nouns, adjectives and verbs, all at once, in every sentence. This is not conceptually hard, but it is a completely new habit and it takes sustained drilling with correction.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Aspiration — you already have it | Mandarin's b/p, d/t, g/k distinction IS aspiration, not voicing. So क/ख comes free to you, which is the thing English speakers struggle with most. |
| Voicing — genuinely new | Mandarin does not distinguish voiced from voiceless stops. Hindi does: क versus ग. This is the mirror image and it is your real sound problem. |
| Final consonants | Mandarin syllables end in a vowel, n or ng. Hindi words end in all sorts of consonants and clusters. |
| No tones | Resist adding them. Hindi pitch carries emotion, not meaning. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Everything inflects | The core adjustment. Gender, number, person, formality, all marked. |
| Postpositions | Mandarin's 上, 里, 后 are already postpositional in a sense — 桌子上 is table-on. This transfers better than you would think. |
| No measure words | Hindi has nothing like 个, 本, 张. Numbers attach directly. |
| Tense is marked on the verb | Rather than with 了 and time words. New, but regular. |
Notice that the order is not the order a general course would use. That is the whole point of organising this by your first language: the sequence that works depends on what you already have.
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.
It depends entirely on what you are comparing. Two things. Hindi is not tonal, which removes the hardest feature of your own language from the equation entirely — an enormous relief that Mandarin speakers learning most languages do not get to enjoy. And Mandarin's lack of inflection means you have no wrong habits to unlearn; you are building from a clean base rather than transferring a conflicting system.
Inflection itself, which is the whole of the work. Mandarin marks almost nothing on the word — no gender, no number agreement, no verb conjugation. Hindi marks gender, number and formality on nouns, adjectives and verbs, all at once, in every sentence. This is not conceptually hard, but it is a completely new habit and it takes sustained drilling with correction.
Not to speak. Many learners work in romanised Hindi for months. If you want to read signs, messages or anything written, the script is phonetic and consistent, and most learners read simple words within a few weeks.
Nobody can give you an honest number, because it depends on hours per week far more than on your first language. What this page can tell you is which parts will be quick for you and which will be slow, which is more useful than a figure.
Everything above can be read. The sound work in particular cannot be self-assessed — you cannot hear your own errors, which is precisely why they fossilise. A tutor is the only mechanism that fixes that, and an hour a week is enough.
Find a Hindi Guru Free Hindi guidesSame language, different practicalities — lesson times and prices differ by country:
Four pages written specifically for speakers of this language — not general Hindi advice with the language name swapped in.