EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By first language › Urdu
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 Urdu and wants to know what that is worth before spending a year finding out.
The same. Not similar — the same.
Effectively the entire spoken language. At the everyday conversational level Hindi and Urdu are one language with two literary traditions. If you speak Urdu you already speak Hindi, and the honest thing to tell you is that you are not here to learn a language.
Two things only, and they are both real. The script: Devanagari runs left to right, marks vowels explicitly, and looks nothing like Nastaliq. And the formal register: where Urdu reaches for Persian and Arabic vocabulary, formal Hindi reaches for Sanskrit. Indian news, government documents and literary Hindi use words an Urdu speaker will not recognise — प्रदेश, कार्यक्रम, विश्वविद्यालय, राष्ट्रपति. That vocabulary is the actual learning task.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Nothing | Your pronunciation is already correct. Some Hindi speakers do not produce the Persian sounds क़, ख़, ग़, ज़, फ़ that you do; that is their gap, not yours. |
| Feature | How it compares |
|---|---|
| Identical | Same postpositions, same verb system, same gender, same ने construction, same honorifics. |
| Register is the difference | Sanskritic vocabulary in formal Hindi versus Perso-Arabic in formal Urdu. Everyday speech is common ground. |
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. Effectively the entire spoken language. At the everyday conversational level Hindi and Urdu are one language with two literary traditions. If you speak Urdu you already speak Hindi, and the honest thing to tell you is that you are not here to learn a language.
Two things only, and they are both real. The script: Devanagari runs left to right, marks vowels explicitly, and looks nothing like Nastaliq. And the formal register: where Urdu reaches for Persian and Arabic vocabulary, formal Hindi reaches for Sanskrit. Indian news, government documents and literary Hindi use words an Urdu speaker will not recognise — प्रदेश, कार्यक्रम, विश्वविद्यालय, राष्ट्रपति. That vocabulary is the actual learning task.
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: