General Hindi (Up to High School Level)

What the official syllabus says

Preliminary Examination, Paper-II, General Studies-II:

• General Hindi upto Class X level.

सामान्य हिन्दी (हाईस्कूल स्तर तक) के पाठ्यक्रम में सम्मिलित किये जाने वाले विषय:

• हिन्दी वर्णमाला, विराम चिन्ह
• शब्द रचना, वाक्य रचना, अर्थ
• शब्द-रूप
• संधि, समास
• क्रियायें
• अनेकार्थी शब्द
• विलोम शब्द
• पर्यायवाची शब्द
• मुहावरे एवं लोकोक्तियां
• तत्सम एवं तद्भव, देशज, विदेशी (शब्द भंडार)
• वर्तनी
• अर्थबोध
• हिन्दी भाषा के प्रयोग में होने वाली अशुद्धियाँ
• उ0प्र0 की मुख्य बोलियाँ

The Commission gives this list in Hindi. In English, its heading reads: subjects included in the General Hindi syllabus (up to High School level). Each item is explained below in English, with the Hindi term as the syllabus gives it.

Topics in detail

हिन्दी वर्णमाला, विराम चिन्ह (the Hindi alphabet and punctuation marks)

• Vowels (swar) and their signs (matra); short and long vowels
• Consonants (vyanjan): the five groups of stops (ka to pa groups), the semi-vowels (antahstha) and the ushma sounds (the three sibilants and ha)
• Conjunct letters (ksha, tra, gya, shra); anusvar, visarg and chandrabindu
• Places of articulation of sounds (throat, palate, teeth, lips)
• Punctuation: the full stop (purna viram), comma, semicolon, question and exclamation marks, quotation marks, hyphen and dash

शब्द रचना, वाक्य रचना, अर्थ (word formation, sentence structure, meaning)

• How words are formed: by prefix, suffix, compounding and sandhi
• Kinds of sentences by structure: simple, compound and complex (saral, sanyukt, mishra)
• Kinds of sentences by meaning: statement, negative, question, command, exclamation, wish, doubt and condition
• Word order in a Hindi sentence (subject, object, verb) and agreement

शब्द-रूप (forms of words)

• Gender (ling): masculine and feminine; rules for changing gender
• Number (vachan): singular and plural forms
• Cases (karak): the eight cases and their postpositions (ne, ko, se, ke liye, ka/ke/ki, mein, par)
• Declension of nouns and pronouns by gender, number and case

संधि, समास (sandhi and compounds)

• Swar sandhi (vowel sandhi) and its kinds: dirgh, gun, vriddhi, yan, ayadi
• Vyanjan sandhi (consonant sandhi) and visarg sandhi
• Splitting a word into its parts (sandhi-viched)
• The six compounds: avyayibhav, tatpurush, karmadharay, dvigu, dvandva, bahuvrihi
• Dissolving a compound (samas-vigrah) and telling similar compounds apart

क्रियायें (verbs)

• Transitive and intransitive verbs (sakarmak, akarmak)
• Causative, compound and denominative verbs
• Tense (kaal): past, present and future, and their forms
• Voice (vachya): active, passive and impersonal

Vocabulary: अनेकार्थी शब्द, विलोम शब्द, पर्यायवाची शब्द

• Anekarthi shabd: words with more than one meaning, used correctly by context
• Vilom shabd: antonyms, including pairs formed with prefixes
• Paryayvachi shabd: synonyms for common words (water, sun, fire, mountain, earth, sky and the like)

मुहावरे एवं लोकोक्तियां (idioms and proverbs)

• Meaning of common idioms (muhavare) and their use in a sentence
• Meaning of common proverbs (lokoktiyan)
• The difference: an idiom is a phrase used within a sentence; a proverb is a complete saying

तत्सम एवं तद्भव, देशज, विदेशी (शब्द भंडार) (vocabulary by origin)

• Tatsam: words taken unchanged from Sanskrit
• Tadbhav: words that came from Sanskrit in a changed form; pairing a tadbhav word with its tatsam source
• Deshaj: words of local origin
• Videshi: words from other languages, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Portuguese and English

वर्तनी, अर्थबोध, अशुद्धियाँ (spelling, comprehension, errors)

• Vartani: standard spelling, including the nasal marks, half letters and the ri sign
• Arthbodh: understanding a Hindi passage and answering questions on it
• Common errors in using Hindi: gender and number agreement, wrong postpositions, redundant words, wrong word order

उ0प्र0 की मुख्य बोलियाँ (main dialects of Uttar Pradesh)

• Khadi Boli (also called Kauravi): western UP, around Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur; the base of standard Hindi
• Braj Bhasha: around Mathura, Agra and Aligarh; the language of Surdas's poetry
• Kannauji: around Kannauj, Farrukhabad and Etawah
• Bundeli: the Bundelkhand districts such as Jhansi, Jalaun, Lalitpur, Hamirpur and Banda
• Awadhi: central UP, around Lucknow, Ayodhya, Rae Bareli and Sultanpur; the language of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas and Jayasi's Padmavat
• Bhojpuri: eastern UP, around Varanasi, Ghazipur, Ballia, Gorakhpur and Deoria
• The groups they belong to: Western Hindi (Khadi Boli, Braj, Kannauji, Bundeli), Eastern Hindi (Awadhi) and the Bihari group (Bhojpuri)

Overlaps

• Antonyms, spelling, idioms and proverbs are tested again, in written form, in the Main Examination's General Hindi paper.
• The languages and dialects of UP are also part of General Studies V.