Not familiar with Hindi but want to learn the language? Ditch heavy tomes in Hindi and switch on your favourite online music streaming site instead.
Many people in India are not well-versed with the Hindi language, even though the latter is the national language of the land. If you belong to this group, take heart. There are many ways to learn the language, and the most common way is to speak it and listen to it being spoken by Hindi speakers.
Another way to learn how to speak Hindi is by exploring online Hindi songs.
It’s strange but true: Songs can teach you a language
India has so many different States and languages, that most people would probably know their mother tongue, the national language Hindi, and the medium of instruction, English. However, a person native to the Hindi heartland would not understand Tamil, for example. Similarly, a Bengali may not understand Bhojpuri.
However, if there is one universal language that binds us all, irrespective of the region we hail from, it is music. Every person responds to a fine melody, or an energetic beat, or a fun ensemble of voices. We see this happen all the time: the party number ‘Zingaat’ from the Marathi film Sairaat became a veritable anthem for all of India, though most people did not follow the Marathi lyrics. But if you really wished to know what the song was all about, you would take the trouble to learn the lyrics and translate them into English or your mother tongue, to familiarise yourself with the words. This is how your knowledge of another language deepens.
A similar phenomenon was recently witnessed with the rap numbers from the Hindi film Gully Boy. Not every person can rap, but if you loved the film’s soundtrack and wanted to rap along you listened to these Hindi songs online, then you would learn not just the words, but also their metre and rhythm.
The point is, if you don’t speak much Hindi but would like to, then listening to online Hindi songs is one of the most fun ways to do it. Not only will you learn new Hindi words, you will learn how to pronounce them, their gender and tense, and how to use them in sentences.
Hindi songs through the ages
There has been a definite evolution in the way Hindi songs have been written and presented through the years. The classics of the 1950s to the 1970s were characterised by soulful lyrics, sometimes peppered with Urdu words. From the 1980s onwards, Hindi film music became more playful, especially with the introduction of disco in film songs.
The 1990s saw a return to soulful, romantic numbers, though modern percussion and Western musical instruments like the guitar and violin made an appearance in almost every film song. The 2000s gave way to rap and heavy Punjabi influences. Today, almost every mainstream Hindi film has a party number in it, while a new trend to emerge is remixing of older Hindi songs to suit present day sensibilities.
