EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Indonesian
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 Indonesian and wants to know what that is worth before spending a year finding out.
Subject-verb-object, so Hindi's verb-final order is new. Indonesian's flexibility about topic position helps a little, no more.
The largest hidden vocabulary advantage of any language outside South Asia. Bahasa Indonesia absorbed an enormous Sanskrit layer and Hindi inherited the same words from the same source: bahasa, guru, dunia, cinta, negara, kepala, raja, harta, warna, cerita, sederhana. Hundreds of words are already half-familiar. Indonesian is also grammatically simple in ways that help — no tense conjugation to unlearn, no gender to unlearn, and a phonology whose vowels line up with Hindi's almost exactly.
Almost the whole consonant system. Indonesian has no aspirated consonants and no retroflex series, so both distinctions must be built from nothing — that is ten of Hindi's thirty-three consonants. Inflection is the other: Indonesian marks very little on the word, while Hindi marks gender, number and formality on nouns, adjectives and verbs at once.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Aspiration | Entirely new. Five pairs. |
| Retroflex ट ठ ड ढ | Entirely new. Five more. |
| Vowels — your advantage | Indonesian's five vowels sit almost exactly where Hindi's short vowels do. |
| Final consonants release | Indonesian often unreleases final stops. Hindi releases them. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Everything inflects | The core adjustment. Gender, number, person and formality all marked, in every sentence. |
| Postpositions | New in position, simple in concept. |
| Shared Sanskrit vocabulary | Not grammar, but worth stating: this is the fastest route to your first thousand words. |
| No reduplication in Hindi | Indonesian's buku-buku plural has no Hindi equivalent. Hindi changes the ending instead. |
Looks like: world in both. In practice: a true friend via Arabic and Persian. So are guru, bahasa, kepala and cinta. This layer is your single biggest asset and most Indonesian learners never discover it.
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. The largest hidden vocabulary advantage of any language outside South Asia. Bahasa Indonesia absorbed an enormous Sanskrit layer and Hindi inherited the same words from the same source: bahasa, guru, dunia, cinta, negara, kepala, raja, harta, warna, cerita, sederhana. Hundreds of words are already half-familiar. Indonesian is also grammatically simple in ways that help — no tense conjugation to unlearn, no gender to unlearn, and a phonology whose vowels line up with Hindi's almost exactly.
Almost the whole consonant system. Indonesian has no aspirated consonants and no retroflex series, so both distinctions must be built from nothing — that is ten of Hindi's thirty-three consonants. Inflection is the other: Indonesian marks very little on the word, while Hindi marks gender, number and formality on nouns, adjectives and verbs at once.
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.