Marathi Transliteration Guide: Drinks and Meals
For a one-word Marathi study card, use the entries for water, tea, milk, food, rice, and flatbread. The forms for “This is water” and “This is milk” are complete sentences, not replacement names for the items. This guide covers identification only, not ordering, greetings, or wider meal conversation.
Start with these expressions
| English | Transliteration | Native script |
|---|---|---|
| Water | paani | पाणी |
| Tea | chaha | चहा |
| Milk | doodh | दूध |
| Food | anna | अन्न |
| Rice | bhaat | भात |
| Flatbread | poli | पोळी |
| This is water. | he paani aahe | हे पाणी आहे |
| This is milk. | he doodh aahe | हे दूध आहे |
Choose a label or a sentence
Use the single-word entries when you are building a vocabulary card or naming an item. The drink entries are supported by dictionary passages that explicitly gloss the relevant headwords as water [1], tea [2], and milk [3]. The food entries are supplied as single-word learning labels for food, rice, and flatbread.
Use a complete-sentence entry when you want to identify something as an item. The two sentence forms in this set mean “This is water” and “This is milk”; they contain the item name inside a longer statement. A quick test is to cover the English meaning and ask: am I naming the drink or food, or am I saying what something is? Choose the one-word entry for the first task and the sentence entry for the second. This distinction prevents you from memorising a whole sentence as though it were the basic word.
[1] Source: dsal.uchicago.edu.
[2] Source: dsal.uchicago.edu.
[3] Source: dsal.uchicago.edu.
Try it
You are making a one-word study card for tea. Which entry should you choose?
Choose your answer before reading on.
Check your answer:
Use expression 2 in the table above.
Choose the entry whose English meaning is only the drink name. The longer sentence entries are for identifying an item, so they are not the best match for a basic vocabulary card.
Make two columns on paper: “item name” and “complete sentence”. Sort the selected entries once, then cover the English meanings and repeat the sort from memory.
Practise speaking with Bhol. Learn words and sentences written in English letters.
