Learn Hindi with short stories

Stories to read in Hindi, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each free one is also a free Hindi–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

Open the Hindi–English library, where you can search the stories and filter them by level.

Want to hear it too? Hindi stories with audio are narrated, free, with a speed control.

By level:

• Beginner (A1–A2): Easy Hindi short stories for beginners, with English translation · 171 stories
• Intermediate (B1–B2): Intermediate Hindi short stories, side by side with English · 192 stories
• Advanced (C1–C2): Advanced Hindi stories, with the English alongside · 33 stories

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of Hindi graded readers, most of them free: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Hindi is written in Devanagari, which is more regular than it first looks: each letter stands for one sound, so once you know the letters you can sound out any word. Many everyday words will already be familiar from Hindi films, songs and from Urdu.

What slows readers down is the grammar around those words: the verb comes at the end of the sentence, small words follow the noun instead of coming before it, and gender shapes verbs and adjectives. With the English next to each paragraph, you can follow the story while those patterns become familiar.

For Hindi speakers, a parallel text is a way into books in English without stopping at every idiom or phrasal verb. Read the English and look across to the Hindi when a sentence doesn’t land.

It works for bilingual families too: one book, two languages on the same page, so a parent and a child can each follow in the language they read best.

396 English stories in the library have Hindi alongside: छोटी कहानियों से अंग्रेज़ी सीखें.

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Hindi–English parallel text:

• गोदान, Premchand
• ईदगाह, Premchand
• उसने कहा था, Chandradhar Sharma Guleri
• आकाशदीप, Jaishankar Prasad

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.