EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Japanese
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 Japanese and wants to know what that is worth before spending a year finding out.
Identical in the way that matters. Japanese is subject-object-verb and so is Hindi. 私はご飯を食べます and मैं चावल खाता हूँ have the same shape, element for element. The thing that forces English speakers to rebuild every sentence in their head costs you nothing at all.
Three structural gifts, and they are large. First, the word order above. Second, particles: は, が, を and に do the job Hindi's ने, को, से and में do, in the same position, after the noun. Third, grammatical politeness — Japanese encodes respect in the verb form, and so does Hindi. The आप/तुम/तू distinction is the です/ます versus plain form distinction, and you will handle it more naturally than any European learner.
The consonant inventory, bluntly. Hindi distinguishes four sounds where Japanese has one: क, ख, ग, घ are all somewhere near か and が to a Japanese ear. Hindi also has a real l/r contrast — लाल and राल are different words — where Japanese has a single liquid. These are the two genuine obstacles and they are both ear-training rather than grammar.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The four-way stop distinction | Voiced/voiceless times aspirated/unaspirated gives four where Japanese has two. This is your main work and it responds only to listening drills with correction. |
| l versus r | A real, meaning-changing distinction in Hindi. Expect this to take longer than you want it to. |
| No vowel devoicing | Japanese drops the vowel in です and すき. Hindi keeps every vowel fully voiced, which will feel over-enunciated at first and is correct. |
| Consonant clusters | स्कूल, प्रश्न. Japanese inserts a vowel between consonants; Hindi does not, and inserting one changes the word. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Particles → postpositions | は/が/を/に behave like ने/को/से/में. Position and function both match. |
| Politeness in the verb | です/ます versus plain is आप versus तुम. You will get this right instinctively. |
| Gender — genuinely new | Japanese has no grammatical gender at all, so this is one thing you must build from nothing. Learn every noun with its gender attached from the first day. |
| No counters | Hindi has nothing like 本, 枚, 匹. Numbers simply attach to nouns. A rare simplification. |
Looks like: tea — familiar as チャイ. In practice: in India चाय means tea in general, not specifically the spiced milk tea sold abroad as chai. Ordering chai in Delhi gets you tea.
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. Three structural gifts, and they are large. First, the word order above. Second, particles: は, が, を and に do the job Hindi's ने, को, से and में do, in the same position, after the noun. Third, grammatical politeness — Japanese encodes respect in the verb form, and so does Hindi. The आप/तुम/तू distinction is the です/ます versus plain form distinction, and you will handle it more naturally than any European learner.
The consonant inventory, bluntly. Hindi distinguishes four sounds where Japanese has one: क, ख, ग, घ are all somewhere near か and が to a Japanese ear. Hindi also has a real l/r contrast — लाल and राल are different words — where Japanese has a single liquid. These are the two genuine obstacles and they are both ear-training rather than grammar.
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.