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.
Grammar Comparison
व्याकरण तुलना
Fixed SVO, not SOV
Je mange du riz. (I eat rice — verb stays in position 2, always)
मैं चावल खाता हूँ। (I rice eat — verb at the end, always)
French doesn't push the verb to the end anywhere — subject-verb-object order stays fixed almost everywhere, much like English. Don't expect a Hindi-like verb-final pattern to show up anywhere in French.
Two-part negation wraps the verb
Je ne mange pas de riz. (I NE eat NOT rice)
मैं चावल नहीं खाता। (single negative word placed before the verb)
Hindi negates with a single word, नहीं (nahīñ), placed right before the verb (चावल नहीं खाता — 'rice not eat'). French instead sandwiches the verb between two negation words, ne...pas, with no real Hindi equivalent — this is a place where you'll need a fresh mental model rather than a mapping from Hindi.
No postpositions
sur la table ('on the table' — preposition before the noun)
मेज़ पर ('table on' — postposition after the noun)
Hindi places location words after the noun — मेज़ पर is literally 'table on'. French, like English, places them before (sur, sous, dans, avec) with essentially no postpositions — expect prepositions only.
Compounding by phrase, not fusion
pomme de terre ('apple of earth' = potato — three separate words)
रेलगाड़ी (रेल + गाड़ी = 'rail' + 'carriage' = train — fused into one word)
Hindi does form compound words by fusing two nouns together, as in रेलगाड़ी ('rail' + 'carriage' = train), so the idea itself isn't foreign. French usually resists that kind of fusion and instead links words with de ('of'), keeping them as separate words in a phrase. So a long French phrase is often just a description strung together with de, not a single compound word to decode.