हिन्दी
Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Hindi is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Hindi involves.
Lingo7 does not read Hindi yet: the app has no Hindi dictionary, audio or shelf of books. Hindi is on the shortlist of languages to add. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Hindi is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Hindi is ready.
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The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Hindi would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: Northern and central India; large communities abroad
Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant letter carries a built-in vowel a, and other vowels are added as signs above, below, before or after it. क is ka, कि is ki, कु is ku. One sign trips up almost every beginner: the i-sign ि is written before the consonant but pronounced after it. Letters hang from a horizontal headline, the shirorekha, and words are separated by spaces.
The script is close to phonetic, with one big exception: the built-in a is often silent. राम is pronounced Ram and कमल is pronounced kamal, and nothing on the page shows where the vowel drops, so learners pick up the pattern by ear. A dot under a letter (the nukta) marks sounds taken from Persian, Arabic and English, such as ज़ for z and फ़ for f, but everyday writing often leaves it out.
Hindi for news, government and schoolbooks draws heavily on Sanskrit, while films, songs and conversation use everyday Hindustani, shared with Urdu, so a learner meets two layers of vocabulary. A full stop is a vertical line, the danda (।). StoryWeaver, a free online library from the not-for-profit publisher Pratham Books, has more than 5,000 illustrated Hindi stories sorted by reading level, a common first step for beginners.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Hindi needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Hindi is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Hindi dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Hindi book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Hindi launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
Because of schwa deletion: the vowel a built into each consonant is often dropped at the end of a word and in the middle, but the spelling keeps it. राम is pronounced Ram, not Rama. The pattern is regular enough that most learners absorb it by reading along with audio.
Short illustrated stories. StoryWeaver has thousands of free Hindi picture books sorted into levels, from books of under 50 words to longer stories, and some come with read-along audio. Song lyrics and short news items are a common next step.
The script is the same, with a few differences in letters and letter shapes. Knowing Devanagari from Hindi lets you sound out Marathi and Nepali from day one, but the languages themselves differ in grammar and in many everyday words.