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Hindi grammar compared with Nepali: what transfers directly, what is genuinely new, and what to learn in which order.
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.
| 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. |
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.
Independent of your first language, Hindi grammar has three load-bearing features. How hard each one is for you is what the table above answers.
मैं हिंदी सीखता हूँ — I Hindi learn am. Completely consistent, no exceptions. The difficulty is not the rule, it is that beginners compose the sentence in their own language first and then rearrange it, which collapses as soon as the sentence gets long.
घर को — house-to. They follow the noun, always. Mechanically simple and completely regular.
Every noun is masculine or feminine, and adjectives and verbs agree. Your own gender appears in your verbs in every sentence you speak: मैं बोलता हूँ from a man, मैं बोलती हूँ from a woman. There is no reliable rule for guessing a noun's gender, so it is learned with the noun, from day one. Postponing this is the single most expensive delay in Hindi.
With a completed transitive verb, the subject takes ने and the verb agrees with the object. मैंने किताब पढ़ी — the verb is feminine because किताब is, whoever is speaking. This is split ergativity. The rule is one sentence long and the exceptions are the whole subject, which is why learners working alone reliably fossilise a wrong version of it.
Notice that this is not the order a general course uses. That is the point of organising by 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 which feature. 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.
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.
Adults learn grammar faster by being told the rule than by inferring it — that is one of the few genuine advantages adults have over children. Learn the rule, then produce twenty sentences of your own with it. Reading the rule alone does almost nothing.
Everything else on this page can be learned from a table. Split ergativity cannot — the rule is short, the exceptions are the subject, and a learner working alone generally sets a wrong version of it before noticing.
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