EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Nepali
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 Nepali and wants to know what that is worth before spending a year finding out.
Identical, and so is nearly everything else. Nepali is Indo-Aryan, verb-final, postpositional, and written in Devanagari — the same script, not a relative of it.
The largest head start of any language on this list. You can already read Hindi. A very large share of vocabulary is shared outright. Word order, postpositions, gender and the general shape of the verb system all carry across. Most Nepali speakers can follow spoken Hindi before studying it at all, largely through film and television.
Precisely because it is so close, the remaining differences are stubborn and easy to miss. Verb endings differ systematically. The honorific system has more levels in Nepali and does not map one-to-one. And there is a list of false friends that will cause a genuine misunderstanding in exactly the wrong meeting. This is the classic case where self-study plateaus at 'understood but obviously foreign' and a tutor moves you past it in weeks.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Very close | The inventories overlap almost entirely. Little sound work is needed. |
| Some vowel differences | Nepali and Hindi differ slightly on a few vowel qualities. Minor. |
| Intonation | The most audible remaining marker, and the hardest to self-correct. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Script identical | Devanagari, the same one. Reading is immediate. |
| Verb endings differ systematically | Close enough to be understood, different enough to mark you. This is the main work. |
| Honorifics do not map one-to-one | Nepali has more levels. Mapping them onto आप/तुम/तू needs care. |
| False friends | A real list, and they cause misunderstandings rather than amusement. |
Looks like: the same word in both. In practice: in Nepali it is affection or love; in Hindi माया is illusion, or wealth. Same spelling, very different sentence.
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 head start of any language on this list. You can already read Hindi. A very large share of vocabulary is shared outright. Word order, postpositions, gender and the general shape of the verb system all carry across. Most Nepali speakers can follow spoken Hindi before studying it at all, largely through film and television.
Precisely because it is so close, the remaining differences are stubborn and easy to miss. Verb endings differ systematically. The honorific system has more levels in Nepali and does not map one-to-one. And there is a list of false friends that will cause a genuine misunderstanding in exactly the wrong meeting. This is the classic case where self-study plateaus at 'understood but obviously foreign' and a tutor moves you past it in weeks.
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.