How can I use the web to practice my Hindi?

Hindi is the first official language of India, along with English, and is spoken as a lingua franca across the Indian diaspora and Indian subcontinent. Hindi branches out its roots towards other Indo-Aryan languages such as Urdu, Sanskrit and Punjabi, as well as Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages from Pashto to Tajik to Serbo-Croatian to English. Knowing even basic Hindi, whether for business, culture, or curiosity, will help you in communicating with over a billion people all over the world and become involved in a rich culture and language.

You can learn Hindi online from the web while conversing a native speaker who knows your language. You can also speak or write Hindi online to work better at your grammar and conversation.

A language exchange complements other forms of learning such as cultural immersion, classroom, and multimedia, because you get to practise all that learnings you have accumulated with native speakers in a collaborative and supportive environment.

Advantages of language exchange learning could be:

• Learning the cores of Hindi language used by native speakers
• Getting used to the way native speakers speak in colloquial and casual Hindi conversation
• Finding a friend to share the Hindi-speaking culture.

How to Learn the Hindi Writing System from the Web

First and foremost, find the Devanagari Script on the web. Devanagari is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal and is the predominant script used to write Marathi, Hindi, and Nepali. It is written from left to right, is deprived of distinct letter cases, and is distinguishable by a unique horizontal line running along the tops of the letters that connects them together.

The next thing to search on the web is the Hindi vowels. Hindi has 11 vowels, some of which are classified by the use of diacritic marks, or symbols added to the letters of an alphabet in order to distinguish different pronunciations. Vowels in Hindi have two forms: one form in which they are used by themselves, and one form in which a vowel is joined to a consonant in a word. For example, अ a and आ aa. 

• अ does not modify the consonant, so if you see a consonant without a tweaked symbol, it will have this vowel sound.
• When आ is added to a consonant, you add the symbol ा in the end of the consonant (for instance, न na becomes ना naa when आ is annexed to it).

What to search for next? The Hindi consonants. There are 33 consonants in Hindi. They are laid out in the alphabet based on how you use your throat and mouth to pronounce them. Because Hindi has more consonants than English, some of them have no direct significance in English. The (a) next to some consonants implies that they are pronounced as aspirated (i.e., with a heavy breath of air such as p in "pit" or "puff").

• Velar consonants, pronounced from the back of the tongue to the roof of your mouth (e.g., k or g in English): क k, ख k (a), ग g, घ g (a), ङ n
• Palatal consonants, pronounced by lifting the front of the tongue just behind the gums (e.g., j in "job"): च ch, छ ch (a), ज j, झ j (a), ञ n