Learn French through Hindi
हिन्दी के माध्यम से Français सीखें
Every lesson explains French by comparing it directly to Hindi grammar and vocabulary — word order, case marking, formal speech, and more — instead of translating through English.
All Lessons
Greetings & Formality
अभिवादन और औपचारिकता
French splits 'you' into tu (informal) and vous (formal) — a distinction Hindi speakers already navigate with तुम (informal) and आप (formal). Start here before any other vocabulary, since this choice shapes verb endings and politeness in almost every sentence you'll build.
Alphabet & Pronunciation
वर्णमाला और उच्चारण
French uses the same Latin letters as English, but dresses them up with accents that change sound, not just spelling — a little like how a मात्रा changes a Hindi consonant's vowel sound (क → कि, कु, के). Devanagari is almost perfectly phonetic once you know the rules; French isn't quite that consistent, but once you learn the accent and nasal-vowel rules, most words become predictable to read aloud.
Personal Pronouns & être / avoir
सर्वनाम और être / avoir
Hindi already keeps its subject pronoun in place the way French does — मैं जाता हूँ, not just जाता हूँ — so French's rule that je, tu, il, and so on can never be dropped won't feel like a new habit to build, unlike for a Tamil speaker used to leaving the pronoun out. Where the two languages truly line up is grammatical gender: Hindi nouns are as firmly masculine or feminine as French nouns are le or la, even though the specific gender assigned to a given word rarely matches across the two systems. être and avoir, meanwhile, are simply irregular verbs to memorize whole in French, the same brute-force way you already memorize होना's own irregular forms in Hindi.
Articles & Gender
आर्टिकल और लिंग
Every French noun is either masculine or feminine, and the article in front of it — le, la, un, une — is your main clue. This will already feel familiar: Hindi nouns also carry grammatical gender (मेज़ is feminine, कमरा is masculine), so the idea of memorizing a noun's gender isn't new. What's new is that the specific gender rarely lines up — किताब ('book') is feminine in Hindi, but its French equivalent, le livre, happens to be masculine — so you can't use your Hindi instincts to predict French gender; each noun still has to be learned individually, usually alongside its article.
Demonstrative Adjectives: ce, cet, cette, ces
संकेतवाचक विशेषण: ce, cet, cette, ces
French 'this/that' as an adjective changes form to match the noun's gender and number — ce (masc.), cette (fem.), ces (plural) — a wrinkle Hindi doesn't quite have. Hindi's यह ('this') and वह ('that') already distinguish near from far, but neither changes for the noun's gender — यह आदमी and यह औरत both keep यह unchanged. French does the opposite: it collapses near and far into a single word (ce/cette covers both 'this' and 'that'), but forces that word to agree with the noun's gender and number instead, the way le/la/les already does.
Plural Nouns
बहुवचन संज्ञाएँ
Hindi plurals already depend on the noun's gender and final vowel — लड़का becomes लड़के, किताब becomes किताबें, गाड़ी becomes गाड़ियाँ — so the idea that a single suffix doesn't cover every noun is nothing new. What is new is that French plurals are mostly written but silent: you often can't hear the difference between singular and plural at all, and have to listen to the article instead. Hindi's plural shifts are always audible, no exceptions, which makes French's silent -s the harder habit to build.
Numbers 1–10
संख्याएँ १–१०
Hindi numbers are famously irregular — almost every number from eleven to ninety-nine (ग्यारह, बाईस, पैंतालीस...) is basically its own word to memorize, with no clean recurring pattern. French numbers 1–10 are refreshingly simple by comparison, and even the teens (11–16), which break French's usual logic, are still far more predictable than Hindi's equivalents. Enjoy this easy stretch before the real French quirks show up in the next lesson.
Numbers 11–100
संख्याएँ ११–१००
French numbers stay logically composed from 17 all the way to 69 — and then 70, 80, and 90 do something genuinely strange that catches almost every learner off guard. Hindi speakers already carry a different kind of challenge here: unlike French (or English), Hindi doesn't build 11–99 out of clean 'tens + units' pieces at all — ग्यारह (11), बाईस (22), पैंतालीस (45), अठहत्तर (78) are all their own memorized words with no shortcuts. So where French's 70/80/90 oddity is a one-time surprise to absorb, Hindi's oddity is spread across the entire range — keep that in mind as reassurance that French, on the whole, is the more learnable system here.
Family
परिवार
French nouns carry grammatical gender — but only two, masculine and feminine, not three. Hindi already trained you for this: every Hindi noun is either पुल्लिंग (masculine) or स्त्रीलिंग (feminine), so the very idea of grammatical gender won't be new. What's new is which nouns get which gender in French — for family words the two languages line up neatly, but French gender doesn't always match Hindi's instincts once you move beyond people, so pay attention to the specific assignments as you go.
Partitive Articles: du, de la, des
आंशिक उपपद: du, de la, des
This is a genuinely new category for Hindi speakers — Hindi has no articles at all, definite or indefinite, so it certainly has nothing set aside for 'some amount of' something. French does, and it shows up constantly around food and everyday needs.
Question Words
प्रश्नवाचक शब्द
French question words move to the front of the sentence; Hindi's typically stay right where the answer word would go, which is the first habit to notice. The other trick in French is picking the right word for 'what': qui always means 'who', while que and quoi both mean 'what' but split depending on where they sit in the sentence — a distinction that doesn't map cleanly onto Hindi's single क्या.
Three Ways to Ask Questions: Intonation, Est-ce que, Inversion
प्रश्न पूछने के तीन तरीके
French gives you three different tools for turning a statement into a question — intonation, the particle est-ce que, and subject-verb inversion — and which one you pick signals how formal you're being. Hindi doesn't run this same formality ladder: it typically forms a yes/no question by placing क्या (kyā) at the very front of an unchanged statement, which lines up closely with est-ce que, and it can also lean on rising intonation alone the way French does casually — but it has nothing resembling French's inversion, since Hindi's verb sits at the end of the clause with no adjacent subject to swap it with.
Modal Verbs: vouloir, pouvoir, devoir
सहायक क्रियाएँ: vouloir, pouvoir, devoir
These three verbs — want, can, must — carry enormous everyday weight in French, and all three are irregular. Hindi doesn't have one uniform 'modal verb' category standing in for all three the way French does: चाहना ('to want') is an ordinary subject-agreeing verb, सकना ('can') is a compound verb that attaches directly onto the main verb's stem, and 'must' is usually built with a dative subject (मुझे) plus है, पड़ना, or चाहिए. French, by contrast, treats vouloir, pouvoir, and devoir alike — all three simply conjugate for their subject and are followed by the main action in its plain infinitive form, with no linking word — a tidier, more predictable pattern than Hindi's three rather different constructions.
-ER, -IR, -RE Verbs & Daily Routine
-ER, -IR, -RE क्रियाएँ और दैनिक दिनचर्या
Almost every French verb belongs to one of three predictable families, named after their infinitive ending (-er, -ir, -re), and each family has its own six-way set of personal endings to memorize. Hindi's regularity runs along a completely different axis: every Hindi infinitive simply ends in -ना, and instead of grouping verbs by that ending, Hindi built one largely uniform present-habitual template — verb stem + ता/ती/ते + हूँ/है/हो/हैं — where the changing part marks the subject's gender and number rather than French's fixed person-and-family endings. Learn each French family's pattern once and you unlock hundreds of verbs — a bigger payoff than Hindi needs, since Hindi's single template already covers nearly everything.
Food & Ordering
खाना और ऑर्डर करना
French café and restaurant culture runs on a handful of fixed polite phrases — learn these and you can order confidently anywhere from a Paris café to a village boulangerie. Hindi speakers already have a useful intuition for why French bothers with a special polite ordering form: Hindi's चाहिए construction (मुझे चाहिए, 'to me it is wanted') already feels softer and more request-like than the plain verb चाहना (मैं चाहता हूँ, 'I want'), and that is exactly the same shift French makes between the blunt je veux and the polite ordering phrase je voudrais.
Sentence Structure
वाक्य संरचना
French doesn't bend toward Hindi's word order — it's worth knowing upfront where French and Hindi genuinely part ways, so you don't go looking for parallels that aren't there.
Negation: ne...pas and Beyond
निषेध: ne...pas और अन्य रूप
sentence-structure.json already introduced ne...pas as French's signature two-part negation. Here's the fuller family of negative expressions built on the same wrap-around pattern, plus a very common spoken-French shortcut.
Aller, Faire & the Near Future (futur proche)
Aller, Faire और निकट भविष्य (futur proche)
aller ('to go') and faire ('to do/make') are two of the most-used verbs in French, and together they unlock a simple, extremely common way to talk about the near future — no new tense endings required.