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Learning English From Marathi: Using a Course in the Other Direction

What changes when a bilingual course is switched round: explanations in Marathi, a new script to decode, and the specific gaps a Marathi speaker starts with.

By Published 6 min read

Reign Creative LLC makes Learn Marathi Language Fast, which this article links to, so we have a commercial interest in it. How we write and check articles.

Key takeaways

  • A bidirectional course does not simply swap the two word lists: it changes which language carries the explanation, which is the part that decides whether a grammar point lands.
  • Marathi is written in Devanagari, an abugida in which most symbols stand for a consonant plus an inherent vowel, with dependent vowel signs and conjunct forms - a fundamentally different reading model from the Latin alphabet.
  • Because Devanagari maps sound to symbol far more predictably than English spelling does, the hardest single adjustment for a Marathi-speaking learner of English is usually spelling and its irregularity, not grammar.
  • English has institutional standing in India: the Constitution provided for its continued use for the official purposes of the Union, and Article 120 allows parliamentary business to be transacted in Hindi or English.
  • Working in the reverse direction makes explanation cheap and immersion scarce, so the study plan has to add listening and output deliberately rather than assume them.

Ten of the language courses in our catalogue can be switched around, so that the language being explained becomes the language doing the explaining. Almost nothing written about language apps addresses what that actually changes — the assumption is always that the reader is an English speaker learning something else.

This article takes the other seat. A Marathi speaker opens a Marathi course, switches the direction, and is now studying English with Marathi as the medium. What is different, what gets easier, and what quietly gets harder.

What a bidirectional course actually swaps

The obvious change is which vocabulary list is the target. The consequential change is which language carries the explanation.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. When a beginner studies English through English, every grammar note, instruction and error message is itself a comprehension exercise. A learner who does not yet understand the explanation cannot use the explanation, which is why absolute beginners in monolingual courses spend a lot of early effort decoding the teaching rather than the language.

Reverse the direction and that cost disappears. A rule about article usage or word order arrives in the language you already think in and can be understood immediately. The rule is then available for self-correction, which is the mechanism by which explicit grammar knowledge actually does something.

What you lose is incidental exposure. In the forward direction, the interface, the prompts and the feedback are all extra minutes of contact with the target language. In the reverse direction they are not, and that shortfall has to be made up on purpose.

The script is a different system, not a different set of shapes

The single largest adjustment is writing, and it helps to be precise about why.

Marathi is written in Devanagari. The Unicode Standard describes Devanagari as an abugida — a system in which most symbols stand for a consonant plus an inherent vowel, usually /a/ — with dependent vowel signs, called matras, used to write other vowels. Those signs may appear above or below a consonant letter, or as spacing forms to its right or left. Consonant clusters are written with conjunct glyphs where the font provides them, and with half-forms where it does not. The standard explicitly lists Marathi among the languages written in the script.

English uses an alphabet, where consonants and vowels are separate letters written in a line. Those are different reading models, and a reader fluent in one does not automatically operate the other.

But the harder difference is not structural, it is about reliability. Devanagari's relationship between symbol and sound is comparatively regular: having learned the system, you can generally read an unfamiliar word aloud. English does not offer that. The same letters spell different sounds in different words, silent letters are common, and the spelling of a word frequently reflects its history rather than its pronunciation.

For a learner trained on a predictable script, the discovery is not "these are new letters". It is "the promise I have relied on since childhood no longer holds". That is why spelling and pronunciation, rather than grammar, tend to be the first real wall.

If you want the other side of this comparison, the Marathi alphabet and reading Devanagari from scratch describes the same system from the point of view of someone meeting it for the first time — useful reading in reverse, because it names the features an existing reader has stopped noticing.

Why English, institutionally

It is worth being clear about what makes English worth the effort in India specifically, because the answer is constitutional rather than merely commercial.

The Department of Official Language, part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, publishes the relevant provisions. Article 343 establishes Hindi in Devanagari script as the official language of the Union, and provides that for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution English would continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately beforehand. The same article empowers Parliament to provide by law for the continued use of English for specified purposes after that period. Article 120 provides that business in Parliament shall be transacted in Hindi or English, while allowing a member who cannot adequately express themselves in either to address the House in their mother tongue.

That is the institutional footing: English is not an imported convenience in Indian public life, it has a defined place in the constitutional arrangements. For a Marathi speaker, learning it is a decision about access to that layer, on top of whatever educational or professional reasons apply.

Meanwhile Marathi's own standing is secure and separate. Glottolog records it as an Indo-Aryan language with ISO 639-3 code mar, describes it as a statutory provincial language in Maharashtra State, and classifies it as not endangered. Learning English is not a trade against it. Where Marathi is spoken covers that standing in more detail.

A plan that accounts for the direction

Given the above, a study plan for the reverse direction should look different from a standard beginner plan in three specific ways.

Front-load decoding. Spend disproportionate early time on reading English words aloud and checking yourself against audio. The goal is not vocabulary; it is rebuilding the symbol-to-sound habit on a less reliable system.

Treat listening as a primary skill, not revision. Because spelling will not reliably tell you the pronunciation, the ear has to do work the page cannot. Dictation is the drill that joins the two — you hear a form and you must produce its written shape, which is precisely the mapping English makes difficult.

Schedule the exposure the interface is no longer giving you. In the forward direction, contact with the target language is ambient. Here it is not. Adding a fixed amount of English listening or reading each session compensates for that, and learning a language without a teacher covers how to build that kind of structure when nobody is setting it for you.

Two things you can safely deprioritise early: perfect spelling of long words, and the finer points of tense usage. Both come with volume, and neither blocks communication the way unreliable decoding does.

How the app handles the switch

Learn Marathi Language Fast is built by Reign Creative, and the reverse direction is a stated feature rather than an accident: the course works in both directions, so English speakers learn Marathi with English explanations and Marathi speakers can switch it around and study English instead, with English vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation explained through Marathi.

The practice formats carry over, which is the part that matters for the plan above. There are ten of them — multiple-choice quizzes, listening drills, sentence building, matching, dictation, vocabulary review, speaking activities, roleplay conversations, timed modes and targeted practice on the questions you got wrong. Dictation and listening are the two that map directly onto the decoding problem this article identifies, and roleplay is the one that forces output, which a reverse-direction course will otherwise under-supply.

The topic list is also the right one for the purpose: greetings, introductions, family, food, shopping and prices, transport and directions, work, travel, health, numbers and time. Those are the situations in which a new English speaker in India will first need the language, and they are the same situations the forward course covers, simply pointed the other way.

The rest of the language learning library covers the study methods — spaced review, listening practice, getting off a plateau — that apply in either direction. Almost all of that writing assumes an English-speaking reader, and it is worth saying once that the assumption is a limitation of the writing rather than of the method.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

Can I learn English through Marathi rather than through English?
Yes, and for a genuine beginner it is often the faster route. A course running in that direction gives explanations, instructions and meanings in the language you already think in, which removes the problem of having to understand the teaching language before you can understand the lesson. The trade is less incidental exposure to English, which you then have to add on purpose.
Why is English spelling so difficult coming from Devanagari?
Because the two writing systems make different promises. Devanagari is an abugida in which symbols encode a consonant plus an inherent vowel, with dependent vowel signs and conjunct consonant forms, and the relationship between symbol and sound is comparatively regular. English uses an alphabet in which the same letters represent different sounds in different words, so a reader trained on a predictable system has to learn that prediction no longer works.
What should a Marathi speaker work on first in English?
Decoding and listening, before grammar. The script is unfamiliar as a system rather than as a set of shapes, so reading practice pays back quickly. Listening matters because English spelling will not reliably tell you how a word sounds, which means pronunciation has to be learned by ear rather than inferred from the page.
Does a course in the reverse direction teach less?
It teaches differently. The vocabulary and grammar targets are the same; what changes is the language of instruction and therefore how much of your attention goes to the explanation instead of the content. The risk is reduced exposure to English outside exercises, so a reverse-direction plan should schedule listening and speaking practice that the forward direction would have supplied incidentally.

Sources

  1. Constitutional Provisions (opens in a new tab)Department of Official Language, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India — accessed
  2. The Unicode Standard 17.0, Chapter 12: South and Central Asia-I (opens in a new tab)Unicode Consortium — accessed
  3. Marathi (opens in a new tab)Glottolog — accessed

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