Learning Hindi – An Overview

Learning Hindi is getting to be more and more popular, especially among businessmen. The facts are simple: in a shrinking world of business and commerce, it pays to learn some important languages for better communication.

Hindi is the first language of some one-third (about 400 million) of the Indian population, and is the second language of millions more. It is also designated as the official language and used in all official communications in India. It is taught in all Indian schools where Hindi is not spoken or not dominant.

Sanskrit

Hindi came from the ancient Sanskrit language, and is a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is related to Urdu, spoken in Pakistan, although Hindi and Urdu use different alphabet systems to represent the sounds.

To most people, the Hindi spoken in Delhi is indistinguishable whether it is Urdu or Hindi. The distinction is only shown on the script or how it is written. If written in Perso-Arabic script, it is Urdu. Written in Devanagari, it is generally considered Hindi.

Hindi written in Devanagari has the letters with bars at the top to connect them to other letters to form a word. The alphabet does not have upper or lowercase forms of the letters. Like English, however, it is written from left to right.

Genders

Like most European languages (except English), Hindi has a grammatical gender: all Hindi nouns are masculine or feminine. All male human beings, male animals and plants perceived to be “male” are masculine. The same is true to all things female which are regarded in the feminine gender.

Things, inanimate objects, and abstract nouns are either masculine or feminine according to convention.

In a sentence, most of the adjectives, though not all, changes according to the gender of the nouns. Moreover, Hindi verbs change to indicate the gender of their subjects in a sentence.

Grammar

Hindi uses the word order subject-object-verb in contrast to the English sequence of subject-verb-object. This means that in Hindi, the verbs fall at the end of the sentence. It also does not have articles, either definite (“the”) or indefinite (“a”).

Hindi also uses postpositions (they are put after nouns) in contrast with prepositions (placed before nouns) in English.

The Hindi adjectives always precede the nouns they qualify. The auxiliaries always follow the main verb.

There are four simple verb tenses in Hindi: present, past, future (presumptive) and subjunctive (sometimes referred by linguists as “mood”). Conjugation of the verbs is used to show the number and person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) of their subject, but also its gender.

Even with its complicated rules, Hindi grammar is fairly regular (irregularities are limited). Hindi punctuations use the commas, exclamation points and question marks like the western style. Periods are sometimes used, although the traditional “full stop” (a vertical line) is also currently used.

Media

Films and songs in Hindi are very popular in general, even in places as Punjab and Gujarat where Hindi is not spoken as a native language. Before the proliferation of satellite TV, broadcasts in Hindi dominated both TV and radio airtimes.

For prospective students, to learn Hindi is neither that daunting nor hard. The experience will also be unique because the language is as old as its culture.