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Reminder:

In the month of July, we are going to use the above book as the basis for our lessons. We are going to send out a copy of the book to people that donate $25 or more to support our site (while supplies last.)

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Objective:

Learn the postpositions (prepositions) for ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘up to’, ‘to’, and ‘from’.

Lesson:

First off, I want to say thank you to Inga from Germany. Inga left a suggestion on the website for some sessions to cover. If you would like for us to cover something in particular, please go to ISpeakHindi.com and click on the “Make a suggestion” link on the right hand side. We are always looking for ideas for topics to cover. And would be happy to cover something of interest to you.

Today we are going to cover simple, one word prepositions. We call them prepositions in English, and in some other languages, because these words appear before the noun that they show the relation to. In Hindi, these words appear after the noun. So we call them postpositions.

The five postpositions that we will be covering today are for ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘up to’, ‘to’, and ‘by/with/from’.

में (men) - in

Example sentences:

वह घर मैं है। (vah ghar main hai.) - He is in the house.

वह (vah) is a pronoun that refers to something or someone in the third person. It can be “he”, “she”, or “it”. You have to look at the rest of the sentence for context. There is no other context provided, so we just assume “He”.

घर (ghar) = “house”.

में (men) = “in” (notice that we write and say “घर मैं (ghar main)” for “in the house”. The “in” word comes after the noun that you are “in”. This is backwards from English. And this is true with all the prepositions/postpositions.)

है (hai) = “is”. (notice also that the verb comes at the end of the sentence.)

Let us look at another sample sentence that uses में (men).

मैं दफ़्तर में हूँ। (mein daphtar men huun) = I am in the office.

It is easy to confuse the Hind pronoun for “I” which is मैं (mein) and the postposition that means “in” which is में. One word for “I” has a diphthong (ay-ee) and the word for “in” has a pure “ay” vowel. They both begin with “m” and end in “n”. Listen out carefully for it on the recording.

दफ़्तर (daphtar) = office

में (men) = “in”

हूँ (huun) = “is”. Notice that when the subject of the sentence is “वह (vah) = he/she/it”, we use “है (hai)” for “is”. But when the subject is “मैं (mein) = I” the word for “is” is “हूँ (huun)”. This is a good thing to remember.

पर - (par) - on

चाबियाँ मेज़ पर हैं।

(chaabiyaan mez par hain)

The keys are on the table.

बिल्ली कुर्सी पर है।

(billii kursii par hai)

The cat is on the chair.

तक - (tak) - up to

को - (ko) - to

से - (se) - from

Now listen to the sample sentences for the other prepositions and come to the wiki on our website and document them like we did above. This will help practice with the listening and writing. Check back to see what others contribute as well:

http://www.ispeakhindi.com/wiki/index.php?title=Postpositions