Hindi is spoken by well over half a billion people. It is also one of the easier major languages for an English speaker to speak, and one of the harder ones to find good teaching for. Here is a straight comparison of the options, including where our own approach falls short.
Good for: the first two weeks. Vocabulary drilling. Building the daily habit. They are free, and free matters.
Where they fail: pronunciation. An app cannot hear you. Hindi has pairs of sounds — त and ट, द and ड — that English does not distinguish at all, and an app will happily let you say the wrong one for a year without ever mentioning it. Learners who use only apps typically end up with a decent vocabulary and an accent nobody can follow.
They are also poor at the gender system. In Hindi the verb changes depending on whether the speaker is male or female: a man says main karta hoon, a woman says main karti hoon. Apps teach this as a rule to memorise. It needs to become a reflex, and reflexes come from speaking.
Good for: listening practice, and it is genuinely excellent for this. Free, endless, and real Hindi at natural speed.
Where it fails: no structure and no feedback. You will watch thirty videos, feel productive, and still not be able to hold a conversation. Use it alongside something structured, not instead of it.
Good for: grammar, which is where most self-taught learners have gaps. Teach Yourself Hindi and Rupert Snell's Complete Hindi are both solid.
Where they fail: the Hindi in textbooks is more formal than the Hindi anyone speaks. You will learn dhanyavaad for thank you, then discover everyone says shukriya, and that between friends nobody says either.
Good for: everything the others cannot do. Correcting your pronunciation in the moment. Answering "why is it like that?". Adapting when you are stuck. Making you actually speak, which is uncomfortable and is exactly why it works.
Where it fails: cost, and it is not small. A tutor is typically $6–$6 an hour. It also requires scheduling, which apps do not.
Being straight with you: you do not need a tutor for every hour of study. The most efficient approach most learners land on is one or two tutor sessions a week for speaking and correction, with free resources filling the rest. That is a fraction of the cost of daily lessons and works better than either extreme.
The US Foreign Service Institute classes Hindi as a Category III language: roughly 1,100 class hours to professional working proficiency for an English speaker. That is their full-time estimate for diplomats. For ordinary goals:
| Goal | Realistic time |
|---|---|
| Greetings, politeness, ordering food | 2–4 weeks |
| Reading Devanagari aloud | 4–8 weeks |
| Simple conversation with a patient speaker | 4–6 months |
| Comfortable everyday conversation | 1–2 years |
| Following films without subtitles | 2–3 years |
Anyone promising fluency in three months is not being honest with you.
Learn five Devanagari letters — अ आ क ख ग — and write your own name. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the moment the script stops being decoration and starts being writing. Our alphabet guide walks through all of them.
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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Lessons run at times that suit you wherever you are — see the hours for your location.