Hindi is one of the farthest east of the Indo-European languages and is in the Indo-Ayrian subset. This is interesting for learning about Hindi for the purposes of going to India because, although Hindi is the national language, it is not spoken locally in the majority of the country. Most North Indian languages - including Hindi - are Indo-European, so there are at least some familiar characteristics for an American learner. However, South Indian languages are in no way related to Hindi or any other Indo-European language, so their structures and vocabulary are entirely foreign to me. I think this is necessary to know as a Hindi student because it is important to understand that not all people in India speak Hindi, and although the regional languages may seem similar, they may not be related to Hindi at all.
In reading about Indo-European languages, I found that the sounds p and k in proto-Indo-European sometimes changed in Germanic languages (such as English) to f and h. So if a word has f or h sounds in English, these may translate to p and k sounds in Hindi, which retained more phonemes from Sanskrit and P.I.E. For example, "father" in Hindi is pita, and "foot" in Hindi is pair. This is a helpful way to remember some key words such as these. More generally, it is useful to know that Hindi and English stem from the same proto language because, in learning grammatical structure, similarities become more noticeable and easier to remember.
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