Somewhat belatedly in life, I have started learning to read Hindi. I’m now over a week in and going strong. The turnaround has come thanks to a lesson on an app for teaching the Hindi alphabet to Urdu speakers. It’s much clearer, having the Urdu next to it instead of going via English or the IPA. This is particularly useful for the vowels as they don’t align – barri-ye in Urdu can be represented by two different Hindi letters, for example, depending on whether it rhymes with say or sand, which I was finding quite difficult to follow in courses for those learning Hindi as English speakers. With my own Urdu contaminated by the simplifications of Punjabi (where we pronounce kaaf and qaaf roughly the same and never use a glottal stop when we can avoid it) it’s hard enough. I recently learned that Punjabi is tonal, which (from the examples I saw written down) seemed obvious in terms of hearing it. I’m not so sure about meaning changes due to the tones, but I am hardly a Punjabi scholar.