The 5 stages
- Rhymes and beats (age 2-4) — Enjoys Hindi rhymes and hears the beats in a word.
- Swar: the vowels (age 3-5) — Knows the swar (vowels) by sight and sound, with a word for each.
- Vyanjan: the consonants (age 4-5) — Knows the vyanjan (consonants) and can trace them.
- Words without matra (age 4-6) — Reads two-letter words with no matra: घर, जल, नल.
- Matra and barakhadi (age 5-6) — Reads the matras and the barakhadi: का, कि, की, कु...
Ticks are saved only in this browser — there is no account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Play on a different phone and the ladder starts empty; that is the price of not tracking your child.
Hindi is kinder to a new reader than English
In Hindi every letter nearly always makes the same sound, so a child who knows the letters and the matras can read almost any word. English cannot promise that. This is why the Hindi ladder has five stages where the English one has six, and why many children who learn both find Hindi reading clicks first.
Swar, then vyanjan, then words without matra
The order here is the one used in most Indian nursery and KG classrooms and in the NCERT foundational material: the thirteen swar with a picture word each (अ से अनार), then the vyanjan in their families (क ख ग घ), then two-letter words that need no matra at all — घर, जल, नल, फल — so the child gets the joy of reading a real word early. Only then the matras, one at a time, and the barakhadi that shows how each matra changes a letter.
One matra at a time
The commonest mistake is to show the whole barakhadi chart at once. Teach आ की मात्रा for a week — का, मा, ना, then काम, नाम, दाना — before moving to इ. A child who owns one matra properly learns the next in half the time.
Read real things
Hindi is all around a child in India in a way few languages are: shop boards, bus numbers, biscuit packets, the newspaper headline. Once two-letter words are going well, make a game of spotting one known word a day outside the house. A word read on a real shop sign is worth ten read on a screen.
Mother tongue first
NEP 2020 and the research behind it are clear that children learn to read most easily in the language they already speak. If Hindi is your home language, start here and add the English reading ladder a little later; the skills transfer. If your home language is Marathi, Tamil, Bengali or another, the language pages have that alphabet.
Now do it for real
When the screen goes off, do something with your hands. Try 🏎️ Steep or flat? — an easy science experiment for ages 3-6, with every step read aloud in your language. You will need a book or a tray for a ramp, two toy cars or a ball; nothing that needs a trip to a shop.
There are 56 more on the things to do at home page, and free printable worksheets if you would rather have something on paper. Ten minutes on a screen and twenty minutes off it is a good shape for a day at this age.
Parents also look for
- Do akshar wale shabd
- Hindi alphabet chart with pictures
- Hindi barakhadi
- K se kabutar kh se khargosh
- Hindi swar
- Ginti 1 to 100 in hindi words