Testing yourself is not a way of measuring learning, it is a way of causing it. Retrieving a word under mild pressure strengthens the memory far more than reviewing it comfortably would. Work through these without looking anything up, note what you miss, and treat the misses as your next study list rather than as a score.
Round One — Everyday Objects
Give the Hindi for each, then check against the cards.
Scoring: five out of five means move on. Three or fewer means these are worth a week of daily recall before you continue. Note that किताब, कुर्सी and चाबी are all feminine, which affects any adjective you attach.
Round Two — Family and People
This round is the one most learners fail, because English collapses these into uncle, aunt and grandmother. The test is not whether you know the word but whether you can produce the correct word for a specified relationship. If you had to think about दादी versus नानी, revise the paternal and maternal split.
Numbers in the teens and twenties are where most learners are weakest, because they are irregular and cannot be derived. On colours, remember that नीला and हरा change for gender while सफ़ेद never does — a question that catches people who learned the words without the rule.
Round Four — Verbs and Actions
Two of these are traps. खाना means both to eat and food, and सोना means both to sleep and gold — context alone separates them. If you can also conjugate each of these five in the present tense with the correct gender ending, your foundation is sound.
A note on how to mark yourself. Count a word correct only if you produced it before looking, in full, with the right gender where relevant. Half-remembered answers and near-misses feel like successes and are the main reason people overestimate their vocabulary, then find themselves silent in an actual conversation.
It is also worth noticing which kind of error you made. Failing to recall a word at all is a straightforward gap that more exposure will close. Recalling the wrong word, or producing a word with the wrong gender, is a different problem — it means something has been learned incorrectly, and that takes deliberate correction rather than repetition, because every review reinforces the error alongside the word.
Scoring and What to Do Next
Twenty words in total. Count only the ones you produced from memory before checking.
- Sixteen or more — your vocabulary base is solid; move to phrases and grammar.
- Eleven to fifteen — good, but revise the specific categories you missed rather than everything.
- Six to ten — go back to daily word practice for two weeks before testing again.
- Five or fewer — start with the first hundred high-frequency words and do not worry about this quiz yet.
Retest in two weeks rather than tomorrow. Testing too soon measures short-term memory, which is not what you are trying to build, and the gap is what makes the retrieval useful.
Pronunciation Tips
When checking your answers, say each word aloud rather than reading it silently, because a word you can recognise but not pronounce is only half learned. Watch दरवाज़ा, which ends in a nukta z, and सफ़ेद, which has a nukta f rather than a ph sound. सत्रह and अठारह both contain clusters that reward slow practice.
Common Mistakes
- Looking at the answer before genuinely attempting recall.
- Counting a half-remembered word as correct.
- Retesting the next day, which measures short-term memory only.
- Revising everything after a poor score rather than the specific gaps.
- Learning words without their gender, which this quiz will expose.
Practice Exercises
- Take the quiz without looking and write your answers first.
- Mark which of the twenty nouns are feminine.
- Conjugate the five verbs in the present tense with your own gender.
- Make a list of only the words you missed.
- Schedule a retest for two weeks from today.