🇮🇳 How to learn Hindi हिन्दी

An in-depth walkthrough of the Hindi writing system plus consonant/vowel tables designed for teachers and self-learners, from UT Austin's Hindi Urdu Flagship program. Work through this before any romanized course — Hindi transliteration is inconsistent and learners who delay the script stall around the intermediate wall. It is static reference material rather than an interactive app, so pair it with handwriting practice.

Twenty-four multimedia lesson units plus an alphabet module, each built around a short film with transcript, glossary, grammar notes and cultural commentary — roughly two semesters of university-level Hindi at no cost. It teaches reading and writing alongside speaking, so it works as a genuine backbone course rather than a phrasebook. The interface is dated and the video quality is early-2010s, but nothing else free covers this much ground this coherently.

The Flagship program's public archive: grammar tidbits, an audio-visual beginner series, a vocabulary podcast, videos of native speakers modelling conversation strategies, and full PDF books including Shackle and Snell's 'Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader'. Everything is free for non-commercial use and aimed at serious learners heading toward professional proficiency. It is a library, not a sequenced course — you have to decide what to use and in what order.

The teaching side of UT Austin's Hindi program publishes its classroom materials openly: Hindi worksheets, beginner vocabulary exercises, video interviews with native speakers and downloadable readers. It overlaps with the Flagship site but leans more toward practice material you can actually drill, which is exactly what most self-learners lack. Expect academic pacing and no gamification.

The closest thing Hindi has to a Dreaming Spanish-style channel: lessons delivered entirely in slow, gesture- and drawing-supported Hindi, graded from super-beginner through advanced discussion of films and current topics. Still uploading several videos a month as of August 2026. The back catalogue is much smaller than the equivalent Spanish or Thai channels, so heavy input learners will exhaust the beginner tier fairly quickly.

A large, well-organised free archive covering Devanagari, grammar step by step, everyday street Hindi and India travel/culture, explained in English so absolute beginners can follow. The catch is that the channel stopped publishing new videos in early 2023 — treat it as a finished course library rather than a living channel. Playlists are the way in; the uploads feed alone is hard to navigate.

Ashu ji posts short, classroom-style grammar lessons to YouTube several times a week (verified active in August 2026), covering things most beginner courses skip such as subordinate conjunctions and verbal nouns. Around the videos sits a small community: a weekly Sunday Zoom class, a Discord and shared resources. Class pricing is not published on the site, so you have to ask; the videos themselves are free.

Bite-size lessons that pair images with example sentences — sets of opposites, everyday words grouped by Devanagari letter, single high-frequency verbs explained with daily-life examples. Useful as vocabulary reinforcement between heavier study sessions, and the channel keeps posting through 2026. It is not a curriculum: there is no ordered path through the videos.

Hundreds of lessons built around a short dialogue that is then broken down line by line, with PDF notes, an audio dictionary and word lists; a free lifetime account gives limited ongoing access and paid tiers run roughly $4–25 per month depending on plan and length of subscription. It is a solid listening supplement, especially where Hindi lacks polished commercial courses. It is not a structured path to fluency, lesson quality is uneven, and the site pushes discount emails hard.

One of the few polished commercial Hindi courses: long interactive audio lessons, culture and grammar write-ups, and voice-recording practice where you compare yourself to a native speaker. It is a one-time purchase with lifetime access and updates, there is a free trial and a 60-day money-back guarantee, and coupons are almost always available so never pay list price. The interface feels dated and it tops out around a solid conversational intermediate level.

Bidirectional English–Hindi lookup with pronunciation audio, spelling and transliteration help, word-of-the-day and quizzes, plus Android and iOS apps for offline-ish use. It is the dictionary most learners settle on because coverage of everyday vocabulary is good and it handles both scripts. Entries are terse — you get glosses rather than usage notes or example sentences — so check a corpus or ask a native speaker before trusting a synonym.

Pratham Books' open library holds tens of thousands of illustrated stories graded Level 1 to Level 4, with a very large Hindi collection — the closest thing Hindi has to graded readers, and all of it free to read online or download as PDF. Filter by language and level and you have months of extensive reading at genuine beginner difficulty. The content is written for children, so topics and register skew young, and the site covers many Indian languages, not Hindi alone.

The Rekhta Foundation's Hindi sibling to its Urdu archive: a deep, well-organised collection of poems, stories and prose by classical and contemporary Hindi authors, with per-author pages and audio recitations for many poems. This is where advanced learners go once textbook Hindi feels thin. It is a literature site, not a learning tool — no glosses, no grade levels, and the vocabulary jumps straight to literary register.

A classroom-tested first-year textbook that starts with Devanagari and builds through everyday situations, with drills, an answer key and MP3 audio, which makes it usable alone rather than only with a teacher. Its pacing is gentler than Snell's and the exercise load is heavier, so it suits people who want to practise rather than read explanations. It stops at a solid A2 — you will need a second book after it.

Rupert Snell taught Hindi at SOAS and UT Austin, and his Teach Yourself course remains the reference self-study book: it introduces Devanagari properly and explains grammar with a precision most beginner materials never attempt. Best for readers who like understanding the system before drilling it. It is dense, the audio is functional rather than inspiring, and the dialogues feel dated — pair it with video or a tutor for listening.

Rama Kant Agnihotri's grammar (now in a second edition) covers Hindi systematically — phonology, morphology, case, aspect, the ergative, complex predicates — in the format you want when a textbook explanation was too shallow. It is a reference to look things up in, not a course to work through. Beginners will find it opaque; from about B1 it becomes the book you keep next to whatever else you are using.

SBS publishes new Hindi audio most days — usually under fifteen minutes, mixing news, interviews and community stories, all free and available as a podcast feed. The episodes are short enough to use as daily listening once textbook dialogues stop challenging you, and the speech is natural rather than slowed down. Coverage skews to Australian and diaspora topics, so it is not a substitute for Indian news if that is your interest.

News articles, explainers and video reports in standard written Hindi, updated constantly and free. Because many stories are also published in English you can effectively self-check comprehension by reading the same event twice. Be aware that news Hindi is heavily Sanskritized and formal — it will not teach you how people actually talk, so balance it with conversational input.

A Himalayan institution that has trained diplomats, missionaries and researchers for decades, built around daily one-to-one tuition in Mussoorie with a structured curriculum and optional online lessons. If you can spend weeks or months in India, this kind of intensive personal instruction moves faster than any app. It is a real financial and time commitment, and the hill-station location means you plan travel and accommodation around it.

Zabaan runs a proper ladder of Hindi group courses from A1 to B1, including four-week 60-hour intensives, alongside tailored private lessons that can be taken online from anywhere. The CEFR mapping makes it easy to place yourself and to know what a course actually delivers, which is rare among Hindi schools. Prices are not published — you have to email — and group classes depend on enough students enrolling at your level.

The American Institute of Indian Studies runs intensive, immersion-based Hindi training at sites in India, with summer (eight weeks), semester and academic-year tracks; summer and semester programs accept true beginners while the year program expects around 120 prior class hours. This is the gold-standard route for students who need documented advanced proficiency, and fellowship funding is often available. It is aimed at US-affiliated students and researchers, and applications run on an academic calendar.

A reasonably active subreddit where native speakers answer translation, register and word-choice questions that dictionaries handle badly, alongside script and resource threads. Search before posting: the same beginner questions recur and the archived answers are often better than a fresh reply. The smaller r/LearnHindi is more learner-focused but much quieter, so ask here first.

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.

The free tier is genuinely usable (ads plus a limited 'hearts' system); Super removes both for about $96/yr. Its real value is streak-driven consistency for absolute beginners, and the smaller courses are thin machine-assisted content rather than the polished Spanish or French trees. Treat it as a warm-up habit, not a curriculum — nobody reaches conversational fluency on Duolingo alone.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.

Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.

Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.