Anonymous Asked: Hi! I have a question I’d like to clarify. A friend told me that to say “She does not understand Hindi”, it is not “Vo hindi nahi aati” but rather, “Usko hindi nahi aati” I find this rather confusing as I’ve always thought that usko was a possessive pronoun? Also, is usko a different form of uska? Please help me out! Thank you so much!

Namaste and thanks for the question! Firstly I’m sorry for taking so long to reply. But let’s not hang around, let’s see if I can help! To begin with your friend is perfectly correct, your sentence is not right. So why is this? Well let’s have a look at the sentence starting right from the beginning…

Hopefully by the end of this short lesson you’ll be able to understand what the boy in the picture is saying, and more importantly why it is said that way!

We want to say “She doesn’t know Hindi”. Now when we say sentences that involve ‘knowing’ something in Hindi we often use the verb आना aanaa - which literally means ‘to come’. Then the sentence is of the form “To someone something is known”. This can be a little confusing at first simply because it’s so different to English. Remember that the word ‘to’ in Hindi is को ko. 

So now using this how would we say “Ajay knows Hindi”? Yeah that’s right we’d say…

अजय को हिन्दी आती है ajay ko hindee aatee hai - Ajay knows Hindi.

Remember we’re literally saying “To Ajay Hindi is known”. Now even though Ajay is a male’s name, we use आती aatee because the verb actually agrees with the word हिन्दी hindee, which is feminine. With me so far?  (I hope you don’t feel like we’re going off topic, trust me we’re getting there!)

Now remember that the word को ko - is a postposition (If you’re not sure what that means then there’s plenty of information over in Lesson #50). Because it is a postposition the noun immediately before it must be in the Oblique case (more on the Oblique case of nouns in Lesson #48)! 

Finally, as we saw in Lesson #61, the oblique form of the word वह voh is उस us. That is why we have वह voh - ‘he/she’ plus the word को ko - ‘to’ gives उसको usko - ‘to him/her’. 

So if we put all this together we have…

    उसको हिन्दी आती है usko hindee aatee hai - She (or He) knows Hindi.

When we negate this setence we have उसको हिन्दी नहीं आती usko hindee naheen aatee - She (or He) doesn’t know Hindi. (Remember we can drop the है hai in negative sentences). Did you follow that?

You may also find Lesson #122 useful here, it was all about the word को ko! 

Finally, in answer to the last part of your question, उसको usko is very different to उसका uskaa, the first means “to him/her” while the latter means “his/hers”. I think in light of the information above you might be able to see the difference now. 

Does that help you? Please be sure to ask me if you have any more questions or would like more explanations, I’d love to help. 

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