Is Hindi hard to learn? Let’s look at that question in Hindi: “क्या हिंदी सीखना कठिन है?”
The first thing you notice is that Hindi is not written with the Latin alphabet that we use in English. Hindi uses the Devanagari script instead.
So learning Hindi involves learning a new writing system.
The Devanagari has 48 primary characters. That’s more than the 26 letters in the English alphabet but far fewer than the thousands of characters in languages like Chinese and Japanese.
The Devanagari script does not make a distinction between lower case and upper case characters, unlike the English alphabet or the Greek alphabet. So you don’t have to memorize two versions of each character.
Learning the Devanagari script is not that difficult. And it can be rather enjoyable because it is quite aesthetically pleasing.
After learning the Devanagari script, the next step is to learn some Hindi vocabulary. And this is where things get more difficult.
Romance languages like Spanish or French have plenty of vocabulary words that are very similar to their English translations. That’s because Romance languages evolved from Latin, and although English didn’t evolve from Latin, it still has plenty of Latin-based vocabulary words.
Germanic languages like German, Dutch, or Norwegian also have plenty of vocabulary similarities with English (because English, too, is a Germanic language).
But when you learn Hindi, the vast majority of the new vocabulary words that you encounter are completely different from their English counterparts. And that makes them more difficult to memorize.
The table below shows some basic vocabulary words in English, French, Spanish, and Hindi:
| English | French | Spanish | Hindi |
|---|---|---|---|
| idea | idée | idea | विचार (vicār) |
| music | musique | música | संगीत (saṅgīt) |
| family | famille | familia | परिवार (parivār) |
| solution | solution | solución | समाधान (samādhān) |
| situation | situation | situación | परिस्थिति (paristhiti) |
| image | image | imagen | छवि (chavi) |
| activity | activité | actividad | गतिविधि (gatividhi) |
| origin | origine | origen | मूल (mūl) |
| history | histoire | historia | इतिहास (itihās) |
| strategy | stratégie | estrategia | रणनीति (raṇnīti) |
Many of the words that are similar between English, Spanish, and French come from Latin. Hindi, in contrast, has hardly any words that come from Latin. Hindi has many words that come from a different ancient language, which is Sanskrit.
A discussion of the easier and harder aspects of learning Hindi would be incomplete if we did not mention that Hindi and English are in the same broad language family: they are both Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European language family includes many of the languages spoken in Europe (with some exceptions like Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian).
As you can tell by its name, the Indo-European language family also includes some (but not all) of the languages spoken in India. For example, Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi are in it; Tamil and Telugu are not (they are Dravidian languages).
In practice, the fact that Hindi and English are both Indo-European languages may not have a very large effect on the difficulty of learning Hindi when you are a native English speaker.
But there are still some Hindi-English cognates (words that both languages inherited from a common ancestor language that existed a very long time ago). Here are some examples of such words:
| English | Hindi |
|---|---|
| mother | माता (mātā) |
| brother | भ्राता (bhrātā) |
| name | नाम (nām) |
| sun | सूरज (sūraj) |
| new | नया (nayā) |
| mind | मन (man) |
| serpent | सर्प (sarp) |
| three | तीन (tīn) |
| eight | आठ (āṭh) |
| nine | नौ (nau) |
The Foreign Service Institute classifies languages into four difficulty levels (based on how difficult they are for English speakers to learn).
| Category | Languages |
|---|---|
| 1) easiest languages | Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Norwegian, Dutch, ... |
| 2) | German, Indonesian, Swahili ... |
| 3) hard languages | Hindi, Tamil, Czech, Thai, Russian, Finnish, Icelandic ... |
| 4) very hard languages | Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic |
Hindi is in the third hardest group (out of four).
This means that when you are a native English speaker, Hindi is significantly harder to learn than each of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, etc.)
Hindi is also harder to learn than most Germanic languages (such as German, Dutch, Norwegian), with the exception of Icelandic, a Germanic language that is in the same difficulty level as Hindi.
Hindi is easier to learn than Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic.
The difficulty of learning a new language is not solely a factor of the intrinsic difficulties of that language and its differences with one’s native language. The availability of opportunities to practice that new language is another factor.
In the case of Hindi, there are plenty of opportunities for practice because Hindi is spoken by hundreds of millions of people. In addition, there is a lot of Hindi-language media available, such as Bollywood movies, and music with Hindi lyrics.
For ancient languages like Sanskrit or Latin, it would be hard to find a conversation partner —but for Hindi, it is quite easy.