These five are deliberately chosen as high-frequency words rather than interesting ones. अभी and जल्दी will appear in your first week of listening to any Hindi conversation, and शायद lets you hedge, which is enormously useful when you are unsure of a sentence.

Four steps, about ten minutes a day.

1. Read the word once, with its audio. Do not linger.
2. Close the page and say it aloud from memory. This retrieval step is the one that builds the memory.
3. Write one sentence using it about your own life, not a textbook sentence.
4. Use it out loud, in conversation or to yourself, before the day ends.

The critical point is step two. Rereading a word feels productive and is nearly useless; recalling it without looking is what moves it into long-term memory. This is well established in learning research and most self-study fails because it skips it.

Do not review everything every day. Space it out on this schedule.

• Day 1 — learn it.
• Day 2 — recall it without looking.
• Day 4 — recall again.
• Day 8, then day 15, then day 30.
• If you fail to recall it, reset that word to day 1.

This is spaced repetition, and it works because the effort of recalling something just as you are about to forget it strengthens the memory far more than an easy recall does. Free apps do the scheduling for you, but a notebook with dates works equally well and requires no setup.

A caution about the fifth and sixth reviews. Most learners abandon a word once it feels familiar, usually around day four, and that is precisely when the memory is still fragile. The reviews at day fifteen and day thirty feel unnecessary because the word comes back easily, and they are the ones doing the long-term work. Skipping them is why people can recognise a word they learned last month but cannot produce it in conversation.

Pick words you will actually have occasion to say. Function words like वापस and साथ appear constantly and combine with dozens of verbs, whereas a specific noun like ‘chandelier’ may never come up. As a rough rule, if you cannot imagine using a word within a week, it is the wrong word for today.

Verbs and adjectives outperform nouns for a beginner, because they let you build sentences. Twenty verbs will produce more conversation than a hundred nouns.

Where you get your words from matters too. Words harvested from something you actually read, watched or overheard are remembered far better than words taken from a list, because they arrive attached to a context and often to an emotion. If a shopkeeper says something you did not catch and you look it up afterwards, that word is effectively already learned.

Learn every new word with its audio from the first exposure, because a mispronunciation learned on day one is very hard to correct later. Pay particular attention to vowel length — जल्दी has a short a, आसान has two long ones — and to the retroflex consonants in words like मुश्किल. Say each new word aloud five times on the day you learn it; silent reading builds recognition but not production.

• Rereading words instead of recalling them from memory.
• Learning ten words a day and retaining none. One or two, properly, beats ten skimmed.
• Choosing interesting rare words over dull frequent ones.
• Learning words without audio and fixing a wrong pronunciation.
• Reviewing everything daily instead of spacing it out.

1. Pick one word now and write a sentence about your own day with it.
2. Set up a simple notebook with review dates for the next month.
3. Recall yesterday’s word without looking at anything.
4. Choose five verbs rather than five nouns for the coming week.
5. Say each of this week’s words aloud five times with audio.