These are the ten that come up again and again. Most learners make at least six of them, and every one is fixable once you can see it.
❌ Main karta hoon said by a woman
✅ Main karti hoon
The verb agrees with the speaker's gender in the present tense. This is the most common error by a wide margin. Full explanation in our gender guide.
English has one T. Hindi has two, and they are different words.
त — tongue against your teeth, softer than English
ट — tongue curled to the roof of the mouth, close to
English T
Same for द/ड and न/ण. An app cannot hear you say these wrongly. A person can.
❌ Main khaata roti hoon
✅ Main roti khaata hoon
The verb goes last. Always. See our word order guide.
❌ Main school mein jaata hoon
✅ Main school jaata hoon
With जाना (to go), the destination takes no postposition. Mein means you are going around inside the school, not to it.
Not wrong, but formal enough to sound stiff. Most people say शुक्रिया in conversation — and among close family, often nothing at all. Thanking a family member for something small can feel distancing rather than polite.
Between close friends it is warm. From a stranger it is rude. Start with आप for everyone and let people invite you to relax it. See our politeness guide.
❌ Main khaana khaaya
✅ Maine khaana khaaya
With a transitive verb in the past, the subject takes ने. This one is genuinely difficult and even fluent second-language speakers slip on it. Intransitive verbs — गया, आया, सोया — do not take it.
❌ Main hoon bhookha
✅ Mujhe bhookh lagi hai — literally "hunger has attached to me"
Hindi expresses many states as things happening to you rather than things you are. Cold, hunger, thirst, fear and liking all work this way: mujhe thand lag rahi hai, mujhe chai pasand hai.
Roman script cannot distinguish त from ट, or the long and short vowels. Every learner who avoids Devanagari hits a ceiling on pronunciation and does not know why. Six weeks of twenty minutes a day is enough to read — our alphabet guide covers it.
The most damaging of the ten, and it is not a grammar point. Learners who wait until they are confident never become confident. Learners who speak badly from week one become fluent.
Say the wrong thing out loud. Get corrected. Say it again. That is the entire method, and it is why the single most useful thing you can add to free study is someone who talks back.
Mistakes 1, 2 and 7 need a person to hear you. The rest you can fix by reading carefully and paying attention. Do not pay for lessons to learn word order — pay for lessons to fix your pronunciation and your gender agreement, because those are the two that self-study genuinely cannot reach.
Reading about pronunciation only takes you so far — the sounds English does not have need someone listening and correcting you. EkGuru tutors teach one to one, from $6 a lesson, and most offer a trial.
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