Sanskrit → Hindi
This is the ladder this app is built to walk you down: a language followed through its own history, with branches taken at the point where they actually happened. Because a language is the largest thing you can learn at once, the roots pay you back several times over.
Hindi descends from Sanskrit through the Prakrits, and the traffic between them never stopped: the formal vocabulary is Sanskrit largely unchanged (tatsama), and there is a second layer that drifted into its present shape (tadbhava). Sanskrit also hands you the Devanagari script and the general shape of the grammar.| Stage | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Rig Veda | देववाणी at its oldest, c. 1500–1200 BCE | attested, recited |
| Vedic & Classical Sanskrit | the language of the epics, the grammarians, the sciences | attested; still read |
| Prakrit | the spoken forms Sanskrit was the polished register of | attested in drama and verse |
| Apabhraṃśa → Old Hindi | the descendancy becoming visible in its own texts | attested |
| Hindi today | what this app can feed you now, from news text | living |
What is built, and what is not
Built now: modern Hindi news text, scored against your own words, with the letters you cannot yet read called out. That is the end of the ladder above and it is real.
Not built: the historical rungs. Reading the Rig Veda, or the Cantar de Mio Cid, or a Tang-era text, needs those corpora prepared the way the modern one is — segmented, ranked, and measured against a reader's words. The corpora are catalogued (GRETIL for Sanskrit, PHI for Latin, Kanseki and CTEXT for Chinese) but the work is not done, so there are no pages for them. When they exist, the ladder above is the order you would climb it in.
One honest caveat about the root: a root is not a shortcut to fluency in one descendant. It is the cheapest route into a whole family, and it is the difference between learning three related languages and learning one language three times. If you only ever want Spanish, going straight at Spanish beats Latin.