How long does it take to learn Hindi fluently?

Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Hindi, along with English, are the official languages of India. Hindi is also the official language of Bihar, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. In Chhattisgarh, one of the dialects of Hindi, namely Chhattisgarhi, has recently been made the official language of the state. According to the Census of India, 2001, Hindi is spoken by 422,048,642 speakers which include the speakers of its various dialects and variations of speech grouped under Hindi.

Hindi is not as difficult to learn as languages such as Korean and Arabic, but it can not be learnt via weekend study either. If you were to study for around 1 hour a day, becoming fluent in Hindi could take about 3 years or more. But it’s possible to get there faster as well. Else it could take a very long time. If you’re an English-speaking American who just knows English, you just won’t be in the same situation as a Bangladeshi who speaks Tamil, English and Thai as well. The more exotic Hindi is to you, the longer it’ll take you to get it under your skin. And for monolingual Americans, Hindi just might be very exotic.

1. Depends upon the language you’re learning: As a general rule, languages that have similar roots are easier and take less time to learn. Hindi language has Sanskrit roots. Sanskrit comes from the Indo-European group of languages, which caters to a whole range of language groups: Slavic, Iranian, Germanic, Baltic etc. Sanskrit gave birth to a lot of other Indian languages other than Hindi.
2. Hindi is grammatically difficult: The script is also what’s called an abugida, meaning that the individual characters represent a consonant and vowel combination, rather than a single vowel or consonant. To make matters more complicated, the written version of Hindi lacks certain phonetic markings to tell a non-native speaker how to pronounce words – and Hindi is a particularly subtle language, where slight changes in sound and context can change the meaning of a word entirely.
3. Too many alphabets: When considering learning the Hindi language, a lot of people immediately find themselves put off by the sight of the Hindi alphabet, Devanagari. While it’s very beautiful and exotic looking to most new learners, it’s also something that puts off a lot of beginners and sometimes even makes them decide not to study Hindi. They simply think it’s too difficult.
4. Pronunciation only looks easy: Hindi has 48 different letters which is almost twice as many as in English. The main reason for this is that most consonants in Hindi have two variants. An aspirated version and an aspirated version. We have the same sounds in English even though we don’t distinguish between them. Try holding your hand in front of your mouth and say the two words “school” and “cake”.

The Foreign Service Institute is an American government institution that teaches foreign languages to US diplomats and envoys. They teach a significant number of languages and have decades of experience on the matter. While the FSI’s estimates are based on an intensive classroom learning setting, and you’re most likely studying Hindi in another way, the number is still useful in comparing the time it takes to learn Hindi to other languages.