🇮🇳 The best websites for learning Hindi

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.