Nepali for Hindi Speakers

What you already have

Two things transfer on day one. The first is the script: the same letters and the same vowel signs. Conjuncts are where the two orthographies part company — Nepali sets fewer of them as ligatures and prefers the half-form spelling, uses variant glyphs for झ, ल and श, and writes a consonant-final र as the eyelash form that Hindi does not use. Nearly no time goes into the alphabet — though if you ever want to check a letter or a conjunct against its Nepali sound value rather than its Hindi one, the alphabet reference has the full set. The second thing that transfers is a wide band of shared Sanskrit-derived and borrowed vocabulary, especially concrete nouns.

Numbers: only two of the first ten move

Counting is nearly free. Between one and ten, only दो and छह change shape, and the second of those becomes a word you will meet constantly for a different reason.

Step one: Hindi has one word for “is”, Nepali has two

This is the single highest-value thing on the page. Hindi है covers both identity and state. Nepali splits that job in half and the two halves are not interchangeable.

हो states identity: what something is. Use it for names, definitions and equations. तपाईंको नाम के हो? is “what is your name?”, and मेरो भाइ एक विद्यार्थी हो is “my younger brother is a student”.

छ states existence, location, condition or quality. यो कहाँ छ? is “where is this?”, यो दाल मिठो छ is “this lentil soup is delicious”, and म ठीक छु is “I am fine”.

The two also have separate negatives, which is where the split becomes impossible to fudge. होइन negates हो. Take the identity sentence above, मेरो भाइ एक विद्यार्थी हो, negate it, and you get मेरो भाइ एक विद्यार्थी होइन, “my younger brother is not a student”: the copula swaps and nothing else in the sentence moves. That negated sentence is derived here rather than quoted — NepaliGo’s corpus holds the affirmative, and you should be able to build the other half yourself, which is the whole point of the drill.

छैन negates छ, as in मसँग समय छैन, “I have no time”, and केही छैन, “it is nothing”. A Hindi speaker defaults to छ everywhere because it feels like है; fixing that habit removes a large fraction of early mistakes.

One thing not to mistake for evidence of that rule: होइन is also the standalone “no” that answers a question, and in that use the clause behind it keeps whatever copula it needs. होइन आज मेरो काम छ is “no, I have work today” — the होइन is the answer, and the छ inside the clause is doing its ordinary job. Discourse “no” and negated copula are the same word in two different places.

Step two: the verb ending encodes the subject’s honorific grade

Hindi verbs already inflect for the pronoun you choose — तू आता है, तुम आते हो, आप आते हैं. So agreement itself is not the new thing. Two things are.

First, Nepali’s high-honorific form is a separate construction built on the infinitive rather than a change of ending: हुनु gives हुनुहुन्छ, गर्नु gives गर्नुहुन्छ. Compare the three grades of गाउनु, “to sing”. Mid grade: तिमी राम्रो गाउँछौ, “you sing well”. Plain third person: त्यो गायक धेरै राम्रो गाउँछ, “that singer sings very well”. Honorific: मेरो भिनाजु राम्रो गाउनुहुन्छ, “my brother-in-law sings beautifully” — भिनाजु is specifically a sister’s husband, and Nepali expects him to be spoken about in the honorific. Same verb, three levels of deference.

Second, and more surprising: the grade belongs to the subject of the sentence, not to the person you are talking to. Talking about your father to anyone at all, you say मेरो बुवा एक किसान हुनुहुन्छ, “my father is a farmer”, in the honorific form, and मेरी हजुरआमा मलाई धेरै माया गर्नुहुन्छ, “my grandmother loves me very much”. The verb is showing respect to the grandmother, not to the listener.

One thing gets easier, though: Nepali first-person verbs carry no gender. Hindi needs खाता हूँ or खाती हूँ depending on who is speaking; Nepali has खान्छु for everyone.

Step three: case markers are glued to the noun

Hindi writes its postpositions as separate words: नेपाल में, दोस्तों के साथ, यहाँ से. Nepali writes the same information as a suffix on the noun. That is the main reason Nepali words look longer than they are, and the reading habit that fixes it is simple: peel the ending off and the rest is usually recognisable.

One of those suffixes inflects, and it is easy to miss because the citation form does not. The genitive is not a fixed -को: it agrees with what is possessed, exactly as Hindi का / के / की does, giving -को, -का and -की. You can see the same alternation on the possessive pronoun in the two honorific sentences further up this page — मेरो बुवा, “my father”, against मेरी हजुरआमा, “my grandmother” — and on a noun in जीवनका लागि, “for life”. If you already choose between का, के and की without thinking, this one costs you nothing; you only have to stop expecting a single invariant ending.

Step four: the subject marker -ले is much wider than Hindi ने

A Hindi reader sees ले and thinks of लेना. It is not a verb here. Nepali -ले is a case suffix that attaches to the subject, and it is a relative of Hindi ने with a far larger territory.

Hindi restricts ने to transitive verbs in the perfective. Nepali uses -ले there too, and in the habitual present as well, where Hindi has nothing. Both forms occur in the present, and they are not free variants: गाईले दूध दिन्छ is about this cow on this occasion, while गाई दूध दिन्छ states what cows do. Poudel’s account of the marker calls the first a stage-level reading and the second an individual-level one; dropping the marker changes what the sentence claims rather than leaving it alone.

What Nepali does not do is put it on every subject. -ले marks the subject that acts — close to the restriction Hindi puts on ने, and the reason मैंने गया is wrong there. Over-extending the Nepali marker is the commonest error a Hindi speaker makes with it, and the corpus has a clean minimal pair in the first person, same tense, one verb with an object and one without: मैले चरा देखेँ, “I saw a bird”, takes the marker, while म हिजो बिहान छिटो उठेँ, “I woke up early yesterday morning”, leaves the subject bare. Say म when nothing is being acted on, not मैले. The line is drawn by agency rather than by transitivity alone, so a few objectless but deliberate verbs — खोक्नु, नुहाउनु — take the marker too; you will meet those later than you meet the rule.

The marker survives every person and grade. First person becomes मैले, not म: मैले आफ्नो चाबी बिर्सेँ, “I forgot my keys”. The honorific pronoun takes it too: तपाईंले खाना खानुभयो?, “did you eat?”.

A reading rule, with the caveat that makes it safe. A final -ले on the subject of a transitive verb does mark the doer — but the same suffix is also Nepali’s instrumental, the “by” or “with” that Hindi writes as से. In इस्त्रीले कपडा इस्त्री गर्नुहोस्, “iron the clothes”, इस्त्री is the instrument, not the agent; nobody is saying the iron did the ironing by itself. So read a final -ले as “this is the doer or the thing it was done with”, and let the verb decide. If the clause already has an actor, or the marked noun is a tool rather than someone who could act, you are looking at the instrumental.

A four-week order of attack

Twenty to thirty minutes a day, in this order, uses your head start instead of wasting it on material you already know.

1. Week 1 — हो against छ

   Nothing else. Write ten sentences a day, half identity and half state, and negate each one with होइन or छैन as appropriate.

2. Week 2 — verb endings for म, तिमी and तपाईं

   Take one verb a day and write the same sentence at all three grades. Say each one out loud; the honorific forms are long and need to become automatic.

3. Week 3 — the case suffixes

   Read Nepali sentences and mark every -मा, -सँग, -बाट, -को and -लाई. The phrasebooks are a good source of real sentences.

4. Week 4 — -ले and the false friends

   Add the subject marker, then work through the words that look familiar and are not. That last list is short but it is where confident Hindi speakers make their most visible mistakes.