Tag Archives: hindi grammar
The Art of Persistence Posted by Rachael on May 11, 2018
As you continue learning Hindi, hopefully you are coming to appreciate how streamlined the grammatical system is, especially when compared to the disorganized, exception-ridden behemoth of a language that is English. Luckily for learners, Hindi has a relatively straightforward grammar based on that of its parent language, Sanskrit, which has a more complicated, yet still…
Compound Verbs in Hindi: Jana/जाना (Part 3) Posted by Rachael on Apr 3, 2018
Compound verbs are VERY important in Hindi, especially the compounds formed with लेना/lenaa (to take), देना/denaa (to give) and जाना/jaanaa (to go), the latter of which I will explore today. If you haven’t yet read my earlier posts on देना/denaa compounds and लेना/lenaa compounds, I encourage you to do so before you dive in to…
Compound Verbs in Hindi: लेना/Lenaa (Part 2) Posted by Rachael on Mar 28, 2018
You’ll recall that we talked about Compound Verbs in Hindi last week. As a refresher, a compound verb is merely a (usually) two-word verb that includes a verb stem and an auxiliary verb. In a compound such as this, the auxiliary verb loses its primary meaning and, instead, adds a different shade of meaning to…
Compound Verbs in Hindi: देना/Denaa (Part 1) Posted by Rachael on Mar 21, 2018
There are many compound verbs in Hindi but, to begin, we will explore compound verbs formed with the auxiliary verb देना/denaa (to give). This and others like it are the easiest compound verbs to master and thus a good starting point for those just beginning to learn about this concept. Now, you may be wondering…
HindiVAALE! Posted by Rachael on Feb 13, 2018
While learning Hindi, you may have noticed the ubiquitous presence of the vaala/vaale/vaali (वाला/वाले/वाली) suffixes––by the way, a suffix is any word or particle that comes AFTER another word and changes its meaning. From Merchant and Ivory’s film Shakespeare-Wallah (or “Vala”) to the chaivaala (चायवाला) on the street corner who brews up just what you…
Navigating Gender in Hindi (Part 2) Posted by Rachael on Jul 25, 2017
In part 1 of this blog series on gender in Hindi, I discussed gender as it relates to each word’s source language, with the language of focus being Sanskrit. In this post, I’ll talk about a few more source languages and how they dictate gender: Persian, Arabic and English! Persian and Arabic Nouns Persian and…
Navigating Gender in Hindi (Part 1) Posted by Rachael on Jul 17, 2017
Many languages have a system of gender, which is basically just an organizational tool for separating words into masculine, feminine and sometimes, neuter, categories. In essence, it is an attempt to further “anthropomorphize” language, which is already such an intimate human creation. If you have studied a Romance language before, for example, you’ll know that…