EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Persian
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 Persian and wants to know what that is worth before spending a year finding out.
Identical. Persian is subject-object-verb with the verb at the end, exactly like Hindi. من برنج میخورم and मैं चावल खाता हूँ have the same shape.
More than any other non-South-Asian language, by a wide margin. Persian and Hindi-Urdu have been in contact for close to a thousand years, and the result is an intact shared vocabulary layer running into the hundreds: kitab, dost, waqt, khabar, mushkil, roz, sabzi, dukan, hava, jang, zameen, aasman, dil, jaan. You already know them, with their meanings preserved. Word order matches. Persian uses the ezafe where Hindi uses का/की/के — different mechanics, same job. And Persian has no grammatical gender either, so at least you are not unlearning a conflicting system. If you read Urdu, you can reach fluency in the spoken language without touching Devanagari at all.
Grammatical gender, which Persian lacks entirely — this is the one genuinely new system and it must be built from the first noun. Retroflex consonants are new. And Devanagari, unless you take the Urdu route.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Retroflex ट ठ ड ढ | New. Persian has no retroflex series. |
| Aspiration | Persian does not contrast it. क versus ख needs building. |
| क़ ख़ ग़ ज़ फ़ — your advantage | These Persian-origin sounds are yours already. Many Hindi speakers do not produce them; that is their gap, not yours. |
| Short vowels | Persian and Hindi handle vowel length differently in places. Worth attention rather than worry. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Word order identical | No adjustment at all. |
| Ezafe → का/की/के | Persian ketab-e man is Hindi मेरी किताब. Different mechanics, same relationship. |
| Gender: entirely new | Persian has none. This is your project, and it reaches into the verb. |
| Urdu is the shortcut | Spoken Hindi and spoken Urdu are one language. Reading Perso-Arabic script, you can skip Devanagari entirely and still speak Hindi. |
Looks like: heart — exactly as in Persian. In practice: a true friend, and one of hundreds. The trap is the reverse: assuming every Persian word survived into Hindi with its meaning. Some narrowed considerably.
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. More than any other non-South-Asian language, by a wide margin. Persian and Hindi-Urdu have been in contact for close to a thousand years, and the result is an intact shared vocabulary layer running into the hundreds: kitab, dost, waqt, khabar, mushkil, roz, sabzi, dukan, hava, jang, zameen, aasman, dil, jaan. You already know them, with their meanings preserved. Word order matches. Persian uses the ezafe where Hindi uses का/की/के — different mechanics, same job. And Persian has no grammatical gender either, so at least you are not unlearning a conflicting system. If you read Urdu, you can reach fluency in the spoken language without touching Devanagari at all.
Grammatical gender, which Persian lacks entirely — this is the one genuinely new system and it must be built from the first noun. Retroflex consonants are new. And Devanagari, unless you take the Urdu route.
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.