Marathi tuition, Class 1 to 10

The Compulsory Teaching of Marathi Act 2020 mandates Marathi as a subject in every Maharashtra school, from Standard 1 through Standard 10, phased in over five years. It applies to CBSE, ICSE, and IB schools exactly as it does to state board schools—no board is exempted.

Most schools use the state-prescribed Balbharati textbooks. If your family has just moved to the state, here's what you need to know: your child will sit Marathi, it's an examined subject, and if the move happened after Standard 3 or 4, she'll be behind her classmates who started at Standard 1. This is simply how the timeline works, not a reflection on your child. It's worth treating as its own focused project rather than rolling it into general homework support.

This catches out more families than anything else, so let's be clear: Marathi and Hindi share the Devanagari script, but that is largely where the similarity stops. If your family speaks Hindi, it is natural to expect your child will have a head start in Marathi because the letters look the same on day one. Within a few weeks, you will notice the advantage disappears.

• The letter ळ. Marathi has a retroflex sound, written ळ, that does not exist in standard Hindi. It appears constantly - in words like फळ (fruit) - and your Hindi reader has never had to pronounce this sound before.
• Different plurals. Hindi and Marathi pluralise differently. घर (house) becomes घरे in the plural; नदी (river) becomes नद्या. These are Marathi grammar patterns that must be learned, not guessed from Hindi knowledge.
• Different gender rules. Marathi uses three genders in everyday speech - masculine, feminine and neuter - and nouns that have one gender in Hindi often have a different gender in Marathi.
• Different verb forms and vocabulary. Many everyday Marathi words do not exist in Hindi, and verbs conjugate differently throughout.

Marathi is not inherently harder for a Hindi speaker than for anyone else - in fact the shared script is a real advantage once you understand it as a starting point, not as the whole answer. The key is that your child needs to learn Marathi as Marathi, on its own terms, from lesson one.

Not every family relocating to Maharashtra reads Devanagari - a family arriving from Tamil Nadu, Kerala or from outside India may be starting from the script itself, not simply the language. For these children the teaching sequence is crucial.

• The base letters first. Vowels and consonants formed correctly, including ळ, which does not exist in Hindi or in most other Devanagari-based scripts.
• The vowel signs (matra) next. Every consonant changes shape when a vowel sign attaches to it, and this is the point where reading genuinely gets stuck if progress is rushed.
• Conjunct consonants after that. Two consonants written together with no vowel between them - skipped or misread conjuncts are why a child can sound out most letters and still not read the word correctly.

For a child beginning from zero in Standard 4 or 5, this represents realistically one or two terms of dedicated work before the school textbook itself stops being frustrating and becomes actually usable.

Once your child is secure with the script, the real learning begins. For a Hindi speaker, Marathi grammar looks similar enough to mislead. Your child will assume rules transfer when they do not. The main gaps:

• Case and postposition patterns attach to nouns differently in Marathi, changing word endings in ways that feel unfamiliar even when the underlying idea is the same.
• Verb agreement with gender and number follows Marathi's own rules, not Hindi's, particularly in the past tense.
• Vocabulary that looks like Hindi and is not. Some are Hindi words with shifted meaning in Marathi. Your child reads these false-friend words, recognises a familiar-looking word, and gets them wrong with total confidence. This is a major source of comprehension errors.

This is not unusual difficulty - it is ordinary second-language learning. It only becomes a problem when a family assumes the shared script means the language itself needs no separate teaching.

In primary years, Marathi focuses on reading, vocabulary and simple writing. In the middle years, comprehension passages grow longer and grammar is taught explicitly rather than picked up gradually. By Class 9 and 10, written composition, grammar accuracy and literature-based comprehension all matter significantly, with higher expectations for handwriting and structure.

Because Balbharati content is regularly updated, we do not use a fixed chapter list. We plan from the book your child was actually issued this year - a photo of the contents page is enough for us to build around.

Classes are run online, which works particularly well for Marathi because students arrive at vastly different starting points—from children who have spoken Marathi at home since birth and need only exam polish, to children arriving with no Devanagari at all.

• Script mastery before textbooks. A child who cannot yet read the script reliably is not ready for comprehension passages, regardless of age or class.
• Marathi taught as Marathi. Grammar and vocabulary are taught on their own terms, not as corrections to Hindi, which is a habit that slows children down rather than speeding them up.
• Speaking in every class. A child who only reads and writes Marathi in class rarely becomes confident with it. Spoken practice, even briefly, every session matters.
• Composition practised to board standard as Class 9 and 10 approach, using past papers and real exam-style questions rather than generic essays.

Rates for group and one-to-one classes are on the fees page.