Now I want you to learn Hindi faster than I ever did. That's my goal.
So right now, I'm gonna take you over the 5 hurdles I had to overcome to learn Hindi.
If you focus on these 5 challenges, you will be learning Hindi and making Indians smile way faster than I ever did.
But first, I've gotta clear up a language learning myth and this is especially appropriate for Hindi.
There is no such thing as "Fluent in 3 months". It's just not possible. You can never be fluent in 3 months. Forget it.
Language learning is a really slow process, especially a language like Hindi where there are so many complexities for an English speaker.
There are not many similarities in English compared to, say, English to German or English to French or English to Dutch...
Any of those European languages..they are a little bit similar and at least you can use the same script.
Hindi has its own script. Hindi has all its own challenges. There is no "Fluent in 3 months". There is only commitment.
And spending long time of years learning Hindi.
Okay, so let's jump into the 5 challenges I faced while learning Hindi.
And unsurprisingly, the first two are pronunciations. Pronunciation is absolutely vital when you are learning any language..like..
what is more important than pronunciation? Than being able to pronounce a word properly.. there is nothing more important and you have to get it right.
Hindi has two issues here for English speakers.
So the first issue is.. Hindi has around 8 letters which kind of all sound the same. So Hindi has 4 Ts.
Listen to these 4 Ts and see if you can hear the difference.
Very difficult, right? These 4 D sounds as well so..
Did you hear the differences. I didn't at the beginning. And this is just because our ears aren't trained to hear these letters.
They are so similar to the English T and D. And it's four of them for us to distinguish between.
Secondly, Hindi has unaspirated and aspirated letters.
And what an aspirated letter is is... it's a puff of air that kind of comes at your mouth when you pronounce a letter.
It's a letter that's really stressed when you pronounce it. So I'll give you an example. There's the unaspirated
and the aspirated
I'll say them back to back now.
Can you hear the difference? That second one is aspirated and you can really..
I can feel a puff of air come out of my mouth when I pronounce second one.
Only a very very little bit of air came out when I pronounced that first one.
And if you don't pronounce these aspirated letters properly, you will be like..
what I did was.. I told someone I wanted a discount but I said that I wanted a **** and they just told me, "Do not say that word!"
Yeah.. that was embarrassing. So you have to learn aspirated and unaspirated pronunciations as well.
Thirdly, Hindi has around 137 letters including conjuncts and what a conjunct letter is is..
when two letters come together and they have a baby and it makes a litter that looks similar to both of them. They come together, right?
So an example of this is Dilli (Delhi).
There's a double L in the middle there. Or the word station. There's a S and T sound at the beginning of that word.
So those are the conjuncts. But the good is you don't have to learn every conjunct. There's only a few which are commonly used.
And the same goes for Hindi numbering. In Hindi, 1 to 100 are all unique words. There's no pattern like 21, 31, 41, 51..
They are all unique. But the good thing is you don't have to learn every single one of those numbers as well. There are tricks to this.
The Hindi language also has genders. Why I don't know.. Genders are such a waste of time.
So for example.. a table is feminine and a bed is masculine.