Writing the Devanagari Script

You're in luck. Devanagari is similar to English in one other important way: Hindi is written from left to right, just like English. (It should be noted here that Urdu, whose grammar is virtually identical to that of Hindi, is written in a modified Arabic alphabet, from right to left.) It has consonants and vowels, but the only punctuation you'll probably run into is the sentence break |, which is a vertical line acting like a period. One difference makes learning the script even easier: Devanagari makes no distinction between uppercase or lowercase letters.

In elementary school, when you were learning to write English letters, you probably had to take out a big notepad with horizontal lines and repeat the letters across the page. You learned at that time that each letter rests on the top of the current line. Hindi is somewhat different in this respect.

For starters, most characters actually have their own line; that is, part of the character is actually a horizontal line, written on the line on the paper (if on exists). A line of letters therefore form a line themselves. Furthermore, the characters go below the line, not on top. For these reasons, each line of Devanagari looks like a row of letters hanging" from a line, as if they had recently been thoroughly scrubbed and hung out to dry.

ककककक

This is a line of Devanagari letters, as you might expect to see when reading Hindi. Of course, these are all the same letter—the letter ka which you will learn about later.

क For now, notice the straight horizontal line that is part of the letter itself. Notice how this line makes up a solid line as the characters are written across the page.