EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Portuguese
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 Portuguese 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. Portuguese's flexible clitic placement is mild preparation, nothing more.
Nasal vowels — Portuguese has the richest nasal system of any major European language, and Hindi's ं and ँ will present no difficulty at all. Add the Spanish-family advantages: clean vowels, a tapped r, grammatical gender, and verbs that already agree with their subject.
Aspiration, absent in Portuguese as in Spanish. And one habit specific to Brazilian Portuguese: palatalising t and d before i, so dia becomes jia. Carry that into Hindi and दिन becomes something a Hindi speaker hears as a different word. European Portuguese has a different problem — reducing unstressed vowels almost to nothing, where Hindi keeps every vowel full.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Nasals — your advantage | ं and ँ are free for you. Tell a tutor so the lesson time goes elsewhere. |
| Aspiration | New. Same drill as for Spanish speakers. |
| No palatalisation before i | दिन is deen, never jeen. This is the specifically Brazilian trap. |
| Keep unstressed vowels full | The European Portuguese habit of swallowing them will make Hindi words unrecognisable. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Gender, already yours | O livro, a mesa. Same idea in Hindi, with verb agreement added. |
| Postpositions | Familiar concept, reversed position. |
| One verb for ser and estar | Hindi's होना covers both. A simplification. |
| The ने construction | No Portuguese analogue. Budget real time. |
Looks like: sounds like chave. In practice: it IS chave — Portuguese gave Hindi this word during five centuries of contact in Goa. Along with तौलिया from toalha and several more. A rare case of a true friend.
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. Nasal vowels — Portuguese has the richest nasal system of any major European language, and Hindi's ं and ँ will present no difficulty at all. Add the Spanish-family advantages: clean vowels, a tapped r, grammatical gender, and verbs that already agree with their subject.
Aspiration, absent in Portuguese as in Spanish. And one habit specific to Brazilian Portuguese: palatalising t and d before i, so dia becomes jia. Carry that into Hindi and दिन becomes something a Hindi speaker hears as a different word. European Portuguese has a different problem — reducing unstressed vowels almost to nothing, where Hindi keeps every vowel full.
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.