What Does This Mean?

One evening my child called out from the dining table.

"Mummy... what does this mean?"

I walked over, translated the sentence and went back to what I was doing. A few minutes later he called me again, then again. It slowly dawned on me that I wasn't really helping with homework. I had become the English translator for every page he was reading.

What struck me was that this wasn't unusual. The textbook, the mastery book and even exam practice papers rarely explain full sentences in passages in English, and in school Hindi is naturally taught through Hindi. For children who don't hear the language at home every day, working through a passage independently can be surprisingly difficult.

That observation shaped one of the simplest decisions we made at The Hindi Lab. Every reading passage, picture description model answer, Muhavare examples and vocabulary exercise comes with an English meaning for the whole sentence just a tap away, not to replace Hindi with English, but to give children understanding of whole sentences.

The hope is simple: that one day they won't need to tap it at all.