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Lesson Transcript

namasTe meraa naam preranaa hai. aap se milkar khushi hui.
Hi, My name is Prerana. Nice to meet you.
Welcome to HindiPod101.com’s “Hindi in 3 Minutes.” The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Hindi.
In the last lesson, we learned how to make a sentence negative using nahiin, a word like “not”.
In this lesson, we will start to learn about Hindi adjectives and how to use them properly.
You will see that for adjectives, things in Hindi are a little more complicated than in English, but don’t worry - it will still be easy.
In Hindi, adjectives will always change their form to match the noun they modify. This doesn’t happen in English, but you will master it quickly.
Fortunately, not all adjectives do this. Some stay the same no matter what!
Let’s start with a concrete example: yah ek badaa ghar hai - "It’s a big house"
[slowly] yah ek badaa ghar hai
To break down this sentence, we have
yah which means it
ek, which is like the English “a”
badaa which means big
ghar, which means house
and finally, hai, which means is.
Now, let’s look more closely at badaa, which means “big” and “ghar” which is “house”
In Hindi, all nouns -- and not just people -- are either masculine or feminine.
Here the subject ghar, or “house” is a masculine word, so the adjective badaa, or “Big” also has to be masculine. ghar is also singular, so badaa also has to be singular.
Let’s see the same sentence with a feminine word. We’ll use “gaadii” or “car”. It becomes:
yah ek badi gaadii hai- "it’s a big car"
Here we have to change the ending of badaa to an “ee” sound to make it feminine.
Here are a few more examples to show the difference between masculine and feminine form.
achhaa is the masculine for "nice", "good", achhii is the feminine version
chhotaa is the masculine for "small" and chhotii is the feminine.
thandaa is the masculine for "cold", and thandii is the feminine.
Fortunately, not all adjectives are like this!
sunDar, which means beautiful, never changes. It is the same whether masculine or feminine. Isn’t that helpful!
Now, if an adjective is masculine, it will also change depending on whether it is singular or plural. Note, this only happens to masculine adjectives, not feminine ones.
Basically the rule is to put an “ae” at the end of the adjective to make it masculine plural
But as is often the case in Hindi, there are exceptions.
Let’s start with an example of the standard pattern. yah ladkaa chhotaa hai means "This boy is small".
Yah, means this.
ladkaa means boy
chotaa means small
and hai means is.
If you want to make it plural, just add ae to the end of the adjective.
yah ladke chhote hain,
This means “These boys are small” Let’s break it down.
Yah means this, and hasn’t changed
ladke means boys. It has changed slightly.
chhote means small. Notice the a has become an ae sound.
finally, hai becomes hain.
Again, the singular
yah ladka chhotaa hai
and the plural
yah ladke chhote hain,
If you use the adjective sundar, or beautiful, however, it will never change.
To say "My sister is beautiful " you will say meri bahan sunDar hai
To say "My sisters are beautiful, you will say meri bahanen sunDar hain. While some words in the sentence did change, sunDar itself stayed the same.
Now it’s time for Prerana’s Points
If you want to emphasize an adjective in Hindi, you can use the word bahuT or kaafii. As in kaafii achha, which is "really good" or bahuT sunDar to say "very beautiful."
In this lesson, we learned how to properly use adjectives in Hindi and how to get them to agree correctly with nouns.
In the next lesson we’ll learn the basic uses of verb jaana, which is "To go," so that you will be able to say sentences like "I’m going to school." Is there somewhere you want to go? We’ll tell you how to talk about it in the next Hindi in 3 Minutes lesson.
Phir milenge. See you then!

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