Hindi tuition, Class 1 to 10

The National Curriculum Framework sets learning standards for two languages through the Foundational and Preparatory Stages, and introduces a third language from the Middle Stage, which is Class 6. So through Classes 1 to 5, a child is formally working on two languages, and the third arrives later.

Which two depends entirely on where you live and what your school has chosen. In much of India the pair is English and the state language. In others it is English and Hindi. Many private schools introduce a third earlier as school policy - that is the school going ahead of the framework, not a national requirement.

This matters practically, because it tells you how much weight Hindi carries in your child's particular school. If Hindi is her second language, it is examined and it counts. If it is a third language introduced early, it is usually lighter, and the sensible response to a poor mark is quite different.

NCERT's own Hindi books are Sarangi for Classes 1 and 2 and Veena for Classes 3, 4 and 5, replacing the older Rimjhim series that many schools still use. NCERT's Hindi learning outcomes are also written differently from the English ones - they begin with बच्चे, "children", rather than "the learner" - and they lean more towards reading for pleasure and expression than towards mechanics.

They arrive in a predictable order, and each needs a different response.

The script. Devanagari is learned once and it is genuinely learnable, but it is often taught too fast because it looks straightforward to an adult who already reads it. Children who half-learn it spend the next four years guessing at letters, which makes every reading task exhausting.

The matras. This is the real sticking point, and it is where most Class 3 and Class 4 Hindi marks are lost. The consonants are the easy half. The vowel signs that attach above, below, before and after them change the word completely, and a child who reads the consonants and skips the matras produces something that is not a word at all. Matras need slow, systematic, one-at-a-time teaching, and they almost never get it.

No exposure. A child who never hears Hindi outside class has no vocabulary to bring to a passage, so decoding it correctly still leaves her with no meaning. This is the difference between a first-language child and a second-language child, and it is why teaching Hindi as though everyone speaks it at home fails so many children.

The approach is closer to how a second language is taught than to how a mother tongue is taught, which is the main thing that differs from a typical school class.

• Sound before symbol. The child hears and says a word before she is asked to read it. Reading a word she has never heard is much harder than reading one she knows.
• Matras one at a time. Each vowel sign is taught on its own, practised across many words, and only then combined. Rushing this is the single most common cause of Class 4 Hindi difficulty.
• Vocabulary from her own life. The words for things in her house, on her plate and on the way to school, before the words in the chapter.
• Speaking every class. In a group class, a child answers in Hindi several times per class. Without spoken practice the written work stays a decoding exercise.
• Comprehension in Hindi, not through English. Translating every sentence into English to understand it is a habit that gets slower every year and has to be broken early.

Timing matters more in Hindi than in most subjects. Class 3 Hindi help is short and cheap, because the script and matras are still being taught. The same gap left to Class 5, with three years of guessing on top, is a much longer job.

A steady share of the families we teach are Indian parents living abroad whose motivation has nothing to do with a school mark. They want their child to be able to talk to grandparents, follow a conversation at a family gathering, and not feel like a guest in her own extended family.

That is a different goal from an Indian school syllabus, and it deserves a different plan. Listening and speaking come first, script later or lightly, and vocabulary is drawn from family life rather than from a textbook. A child who can hold a five-minute phone conversation with her grandmother has achieved the actual objective, whether or not she can write a formal letter.

Classes run with a matched teacher or one-to-one, and timings are arranged around the family's own time zone rather than the Indian school day. If this is closer to what you are looking for than exam support, say so when you book - the two plans genuinely look different from week one.

For children in Indian schools who need both - a good Hindi mark and the ability to actually use the language - we run them together, but the speaking always comes first in the class, because it is what makes the reading worth doing.

From Class 6, Hindi divides into three parts that are prepared for separately, and students who treat it as one subject tend to over-prepare the easiest of the three.

• Vyakaran. Sandhi, samas, upsarg and pratyay, kaarak, ling and vachan, muhavare. This is the most reliably scoreable part of the paper, because the rules are finite and the questions are predictable, and it is the part most students neglect.
• Literature. The prescribed gadya and padya, with questions that increasingly ask for interpretation rather than recall. A student who has memorised the meaning of a poem rather than understood it will manage until about Class 8.
• Lekhan. Patra lekhan, anuchchhed lekhan, sanvad lekhan and, later, formal writing formats. Like English, these carry format marks that are independent of the quality of the content.

At Class 9 and 10, CBSE offers Hindi in two courses, commonly known as Course A and Course B, which differ in weight and in the texts prescribed. Which one your child's school follows changes the preparation quite a lot, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming.

For a child who does not hear Hindi at home, the honest advice is to put the effort into vyakaran and the writing formats. They are rule-based, they can be secured by practice, and they do not depend on the vocabulary depth a first-language classmate arrives with. Literature marks follow later, once reading has become comfortable enough that a passage can be read without translating it. If the script itself is still shaky, deal with that first - it is shared ground with Sanskrit, so a term spent on it pays into both.