Learn how to ask "What?"
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| 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 three minutes”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Hindi. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to use the verb aanaa. |
| In this lesson, we will jump into our series dedicated to question words in Hindi. Our first word is not only the most common question word, but sometimes it is also used as an interjection. The word we are talking about is “what” in English. You’ll see that there are many ways to translate it in Hindi. |
| So imagine you want to ask your friend "What is you doing?" How will you do it? |
| You will ask: Tum kyaa kar rahe ho? |
| [slowly] Tum kyaa kar rahe ho? |
| So let’s break down this answer: |
| Tum is the informal word for "you" |
| kyaa is the question word "What" in Hindi. |
| kar rahe is the present tense of “do”, “doing” which comes from the verb karna |
| ho is the verb “to be” which is used with Tum |
| What are you doing? |
| Tum kyaa kar rahe ho? |
| In English if you want to ask a question, you have to change the verb order. For |
| example, if you wanted to turn the statement, "This is your house" into a |
| question, you'd arrange it such that the verb comes at the beginning, "Is this your house?" |
| Well, we have some good news. None of this |
| is necessary in Hindi! In Hindi, sentences can be changed to questions just by adjusting the tone of your speech. |
| Here’s an example of this question tone as said by a male speaker. |
| main aapkii maDaD kar sakTaa hoon? |
| And here is an example as said by a female speaker: |
| main aapkii maDaD kar sakTii hoon? |
| this means |
| "Can I help you?" |
| Instead of turning statements into questions with the change of tone, you |
| can also add the word क्या, kyaa ("what") for emphasis. It always goes at the |
| beginning of the question. |
| For example: |
| kyaa main aapkii maDaD kar sakTaa hoon? |
| "Can I help you?" for a male speaker. |
| Kyaa main aapkii maDaD kar sakTaa hoon? for a female. |
| Simple yes-no questions can be formed by the optional placement of the question word kyaa in the initial position of a declarative sentence. |
| Let’s look at another example. If we were to ask someone if the house belongs to him. We could say Yah aapkaa ghar hai? |
| "Is this your house?" |
| But to emphasize the question, we add the question word kyaa at the beginning of the sentence and it becomes kyaa yah aapkaa ghar hai? |
| "Is this your house?" |
| Now it’s time for Prerana’s points. |
| The question word kya is also used in exclamations. |
| For example, when you look at a beautiful garden, you could say |
| kyaa sunDar bagichaa hai! |
| What a beautiful garden! |
| In this lesson, we learned how to use the Hindi word "What" in different kinds of sentences. |
| I know it is not always simple but I am sure you will remember these short rules! |
| In the next lesson, we will talk about the Hindi equivalent for the word "Where". |
| Do you know it already? I can promise it’s easier than "what"! |
| I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next lesson. |
| Phir milenge. See you then! |
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