EkGuru › Learn Hindi › By country › Madagascar
Everything below is specific to learning Hindi from Madagascar: what your first language gives you for free, what it does not, when lessons would actually be, and what an hour costs in MGA. Lessons are online, so the tutor being in India is not a limitation — but the timezone and the currency are real, and they are worked out here.
Madagascar's Karana community — families of Gujarati and Ismaili origin, settled for well over a century — is one of the more substantial Indian-origin populations in Africa, concentrated in Antananarivo and the trading towns. Hindi and Gujarati remain living community languages there. Malagasy itself is an Austronesian language, related to those of Borneo rather than to anything African, and it carries Sanskrit vocabulary borrowed long ago through that Austronesian connection. French, spoken widely, adds nasal vowels that transfer directly to Hindi's anusvara. The retroflex consonants and grammatical gender are the genuinely new material.
Our tutors teach on Indian Standard Time, which is UTC+5:30. Converted to Madagascar, at UTC+3, the teaching window runs from about 06:30 to 19:30.
Two honest caveats. That figure uses standard time and ignores daylight saving, which moves it by an hour for part of the year in many countries; and some countries span several zones. Do not plan around the numbers on this page — the booking page reads your device's own timezone and shows each slot in it, and that is the number that will be right.
Lessons start at $6 for 50 min. Every price on the site converts to your own currency automatically, at live rates rather than a number typed in last year. There is no subscription and no account.
| English | Hindi | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Hello / greetings | नमस्ते | namaste |
| Thank you | धन्यवाद | dhanyavaad |
| My name is … | मेरा नाम … है | mera naam … hai |
| I don't understand | मुझे समझ नहीं आया | mujhe samajh nahin aaya |
| How much is this? | यह कितने का है? | yeh kitne ka hai |
These five are universal rather than specific to Madagascar — they are simply the ones every beginner needs first. The phrasebook tool has the rest, searchable and grouped by situation.
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.
Yes. Lessons are online and one to one over video, so where you are does not limit which tutor you can work with. What it does affect is the hours that suit you both — converted to local time here, tutors teach from about 06:30 to 19:30.
Our tutors teach on Indian time. In Madagascar that works out at roughly 06:30 to 19:30, allowing for the usual daylight-saving shift. The booking page converts every slot using your own device's timezone, so you never have to do this arithmetic yourself.
Lessons start at $6 for 50 min. Prices are shown in your own currency automatically and converted at live rates.
No. Plenty of learners start with spoken Hindi and add reading later, or never. If you do want the script, our free alphabet guide covers every letter and there is an interactive explorer that shows each one with a real word.
Reading gets you the grammar. Speaking is the part that only happens with another human. EkGuru tutors are native Hindi speakers in India who teach one to one over video — no group classes, no subscription.
Find a Hindi Guru Free Hindi guidesWhere you are decides the hours and the price. What you already speak decides which parts of Hindi are easy and which are slow — and those are different questions with different answers.
Questions people ask before they start are answered in the questions section, and short factual answers live under answers. If you want a tutor now, the tutor list shows everyone available.