The best AI apps to practice speaking Hindi

What you need to practice speaking Hindi

Hindi sits right in the middle. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 41st hardest for English speakers, at 4,936 effort points. That’s about 1.7 times what Spanish takes (2,941), a bit more than German (4,255), and a lot less than Russian (6,067). Urdu, its close cousin, is 38th, at 5,111.

The script looks like the hard part. It isn’t, for long. What makes Hindi hard is the sounds English doesn’t have, and the grammar of gender and the past tense, at full speed, in a real conversation.

• DevanagariHindi is written in Devanagari, with a line along the top that joins the letters of a word. Vowels after a consonant become little marks around it: क is ka, कि ki, कु ku. It’s quite regular, so once you know the letters you can sound out most words. Until then, you want the pronunciation above each word.
• Sounds English doesn’t splitHindi has two kinds of t and d. दाल, lentils, is said with your tongue on your teeth. डाल, a branch, with your tongue curled back. And most consonants come with and without a puff of air: पल is a moment, फल a fruit. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• Verbs with a gender, and नेVerbs change with who’s talking. A man says मैं जाता हूँ, a woman मैं जाती हूँ: I go. In the past tense, a verb like खाना, to eat, turns I into मैंने, and the verb agrees with what you ate: मैंने खाना खाया, but मैंने रोटी खाई, because रोटी is feminine. Knowing the rule is one thing. Getting it right while you talk takes practice.
• Everyday Hindi, Hinglish includedThe Hindi people speak isn’t the Hindi in textbooks. In Delhi or Mumbai you hear English words all the time: कल ऑफ़िस जाना है, I have to go to the office tomorrow. And plenty of people say शुक्रिया, or just thank you, where the textbook says धन्यवाद. You learn what people really say by hearing it.
• Lots of Hindi you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: Hindi videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeHindi takes more hours than the easiest languages, and most of them should be spent talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Hindi. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Hindi YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories at your level, with the transliteration above every word. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right gender, the ने in the right place and the verb agreeing. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Hindi? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn Devanagari and the basics with Duolingo (free), which teaches Hindi from zero, or Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Hindi

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies with the transliteration above every word, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Hindi teachers

Three teachers: Arjun from Delhi, Kavya from Jaipur and Neha from Mumbai. Each has their own voice, so pick the one you like.

• 
  Arjun Sharma

  Delhi · Indian
• 
  Kavya Mehta

  Jaipur · Indian
• 
  Neha Kapoor

  Mumbai · Indian

Input: Hindi to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Hindi you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, both with the transliteration above every word. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Hindi YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with: the transliteration above the Devanagari, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Stories written for youRead writes Hindi texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Hindi word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Hindi on Duolingo: 13.6 million learners, it says. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending