Your Guide to Learning Hindi Online

Namaste and welcome to your guide to learning Hindi online. Whether you’re a complete beginner, looking for extra material to augment your Hindi course or want to keep your Hindi skills up to scratch post-study, there is a great range of online Hindi resources out there to help. Here is a selection of sites, apps and online classes Asia Options recommends you try.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you have your own favourite site you would like to share please get in touch.

Online Hindi lessons and resources

Hindi Bhasha

Hindi Bhasha is a site dedicated to teaching you the Devanagari script – the script used in Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit. It has straightforward animated and audio tutorials on how to write and pronounce the intricate vowels and consonants, followed up by short tests for you to practice.

You’ll learn devanagari in no time on Hindi Bhasha.

Learning-Hindi

Learning-Hindi is the perfect place to start familiarising yourself with Hindi. It has a growing number of short, sharp lessons that are easy to digest. Starting with the alphabet and progressing to elementary grammar, each lessons are well explained and intermingled with blog posts on Indian culture or particle lessons like ‘I love you’.

As you progress, the site also has over 60 children’s books in pdf format for you to improve your reading. The site is sleek and user-friendly.

A Door to Hindi

A Door to Hindi is a comprehensive elementary to intermediate course developed by the US Department of Education and Afroz Taj at the North Carolina State University. It has 24 lessons each structured around a short video and accompanying transcript with interactive grammar notes. Each lesson has exercises, a vocabulary list and a quiz.

The site is a little clunky to use but easy enough once you get the hang of it. It’s worth re-watching the videos as you progress – you’ll pick up something new each time.

Learning Hindi from Bollywood Movies

What could be a more fun than Learning Hindi from Bollywood Movies? This blog, which is run by Arun Krishnan, has over 100 short clips of classic Bollywood scenes with English translations of key words. Although it doesn’t have the full transcript of each song, it will expand your vocabulary by a few words a day and with the catchy tunes you won’t forget them in a hurry!

Hindi Urdu Flagship

Hindi Urdu Flagship offers a huge range of teaching and learning resources for all levels of Hindi. The University of Texas runs the site as part of its undergraduate Hindi course. It’s one of the most comprehensive sites out there with contributions from leading academics. Its long list of Hindi worksheets, readers, podcasts, funny voicemail recordings and even full beginner text books will keep you busy for a while.

It also has a suite of interviews with Hindi writers and artists (in Hindi) and lecture recordings from the Hindi Urdu Flagship course (in English), which explore relevant topics in depth.

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania has online Hindi lessons for advanced, beginner and intermediate levels. Its lessons are chapters from the text book New Directions New People, which uses a neat narrative based approach to cover a broad range of everyday situations. Each lesson has a video accompanied by a transcript and exercises to practice what you’ve learned.

The site is easy to use and good for higher levels.

Online Hindi classes

Zabaan

Zabaan language school offers one-on-one Hindi class online via Skype or Google+. Based in Delhi, the school has an excellent reputation for providing high quality courses to its students. Zabaan’s online classes are easy to organise and tailored to suit your level of Hindi and availability. But they are popular, so get in touch early to organise the times you want.

Once you’ve organised a time for your online class, your teacher will provide you with a soft copy of all the course material you’ll need. The teacher will also provide you with follow-up homework exercises to complete between lessons. But you can always ask for more or less depending on your time commitments. You can pay for lessons via TransferWise or bank transfers.

HindiGuru

HindiGuru is another popular option for online classes. It offers one-on-one and group classes via HindiGuru’s virtual class room software or Skype. The advantage of the virtual classroom is that you have access to all of HindiGuru’s existing course material and can enjoy slightly more interactive lessons. HindiGuru asks that you pay for lessons by bank transfer.

Compared to Zabaan, HindiGuru is an affordable option and also offers the addition of group classes online. It’s online classes are about half the price of Zabaan’s. However, Zabaan has a slightly higher reputation for quality. All in all, HindiGuru is a good place to start for your first online classes.

Italki

Italki is a terrific online market places for online Skype classes for a wide range of different languages, including online Hindi classes. The beauty of learning Hindi on Italki is that you can shop around for language teachers with different levels of experience, class times and class prices.

Once you have picked the teacher that best suits your needs you can organise a one-on-one language class on Skype and pay for the class with Paypal. Due to different time zones around the world and the international community on Italki, you could even arrange classes in the morning before work or class – just turn off the Skype camera if you don’t have time to wash your face! Follow this link to get $10 free to your account.

If you’re keen to hone your Hindi skills even more, why not check out some of the courses available in India.

• Learning Hindi in the Himalayas at Landour Language School
  
• Cathy’s experience learning Hindi in Delhi