Intro #3: Devanagari - The Hindi Alphabet!

So in Intro #1: About Hindi you may remember that it was briefly mentioned that Hindi is written in what’s called the Devanagari script. Here’s I’m going to introduce you to some of the main concepts of this. Unfortunately we’re not going to be able to learn to read and write overnight, but slowly, step by step we’ll get there!

Devanagari, or देवनागरी, is the name of the alphabet that Hindi is written in. Devanagari is also used to write other languages, like Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi and so on. Each language has it’s own slight modification to the alphabet - this is just like how the Latin alphabet (the one we’re using here!) is used for other languages like Spanish and French, which have their own modifications - like the letter é in French and ñ in Spanish.

These are the Hindi vowels - do you recon they look a little scary?
Well don’t be put off, we’re here to teach you it all!

Now I’m going to tell you a fact you might not believe, ready? Compared to English, Hindi is much much easier to read! See I told you you wouldn’t believe me. So let me tell you why. This about the words ‘cat’ and 'city’, these both start with the letter 'c’, but they start with different sounds! Cat starts with a 'k’ sound and city and ’s’ sound. Confusing hey! In Hindi every letters always has the same pronunciation*.

So let’s learn a few things about Devanagari. Firstly the most distinctive look about it is the horizontal line that’s above almost all the letters, it looks like a washing line with the letters hanging from it!

namaste aap kaise hain? - Hello, how are you?
Notice how the letters hang from the red 'washing line’

There are no capital letters in Devanagari - which makes our life a lot easier! We use something called a transliteration to help us read the Hindi words, what does this mean? Well for example here’s a Hindi word: प्यार it means 'love’ in Hindi. A transliteration tells us how to pronounce this word by writing it in English letters, so for this word we’d write pyaar - that’s approximately how the word is pronounced! The transliteration will always be in italics - but you should not learn to rely on it!

Everyone gets confused learning new things
- but stick with it and you’ll get there!

Punctuation marks are exactly the same as English ones but sometimes you’ll see a । which means exactly the same as a full stop (/period).

Hopefully this has given you enough background information for you to progress on to the Hindi Vowels and Hindi Consonants sections where you start to learn the letters of Devanagari in detail: