Lesson #50: Postpositions
Today we’re going to learn how to use postpositions in Hindi and, of course, I’ll show you a bunch of examples! So firstly then, what even are postpositions? Well, basically postposition are words like in, on, from, to etc.
In English we call them Prepositions because they come before the word (ie on the table) but in Hindi they come after the word, so we’d literally say ‘table on’!
We’re going to be using the Oblique case a lot in the lesson, so make sure you’ve read about the Oblique case in Lesson #48! So are you ready to begin? अच्छा acchaa - Great! Let’s learn some postpositions first…
में men - In
पर par - On
से se - From
को ko - To
Of course there are many more, but this is a good start! They’re all pretty straight forward, yeah? So how do we use these words? Well, it’s easy! All we do is put the Noun into the Oblique case, exactly as we learnt in Lesson #48, and then the Postposition comes afterwards. Simple! Let me show you some examples!
घर में ghar men - In The House
Can you see? All we do is put our new Preposition में men right after the word घर ghar - House. (This word doesn’t change at all in the Oblique case). So all together we have घर में ghar men - In The House. Easy! Just remember the words go in the opposite order to English! Ready for another example?
किताबों पर kitaabon par - On The Books
So can you see what’s happened here? There is one little tricky thing though! We’ve started with the word किताबें kitaaben - books but because there’s a postposition after it, it’s changed into the Oblique case (as we saw in Lesson #48) so we have किताबों kitaabon!
लड़के से larke se - From The Boy
I’m sure you get the pattern by now, it’s really easy! Now we use these Postpositions to build up even more complicated sentences! Are you ready?
किताब मेज़ पर है kitaab mez par hai
- The book is on the table.
Can you see what we’ve done here? We start with किताब kitaab - book, then we have मेज़ पर mez par which means On the Table, and finally है hai - is. Simple!
मैं पाकिस्तान से हूँ main paakistaan se hoon
- I am from Pakistan
You can learn loads more about asking the question 'Where are you from?’ as well as replying to it, in Lesson #45.
How was that? We’ll see more examples as we go along, but for now this should give you a good idea! Try and think of some example sentences using the postpositions we’ve learnt yourself, write them in the comment box below if you want to!
