Spoken by over 500 million people around the world, Hindi is one of the official languages of India and Fiji. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Hindi is originally based on Sanskrit, including its name which originated from the Sanskrit word "Sindhu" (another name for the Indus River). ref
The Persians designated the land around the Indus River as Hindu, a mispronunciation of the Sanskrit sindhu which means “Land of the Indus River”. Turkish invaders in the early 11th century named the language of the region Hindi, ‘language of the land of the Indus River’.
Hindi uses the देवनागरी devanagari script, which is used for over 120 languages, and is where consonant-vowel pairs are written as a unit.
Devanagari is a phonetic script (that is, each letter stands for one sound), there's no need to have a name for each letter. Instead, you can simply call the letter by the sound it makes, followed by a sound like the "a" in majority.
The alphabet / वर्णमाला (Varnamaala : ("garland of letters") ) for Devanagari has 47 primary characters, and is written from left to right. ref
Horizontal line
The horizontal bar is used to group letters belonging to a word, and is called शिरोरेखा shirorekhā. Letters on their own have this line except for two consonants:ध [dh] and भ [bh]
The right vertical stroke after a character
24 out of the 36 consonants contain a vertical right stroke, for example ख [kh], घ [gh], ण [n]. This angled substroke is used to indicate that a consonant symbol stands for a consonant without any vowel. ref
The right stroke is also used to mark a full stop. But nowadays, a normal full stop is frequently used to end a sentence.
Also see here.
Varnas letter characters
Varna वर्ण (letter character) are broadly classified into
Vowels and consonants in ordered in the alphabet, starting with sounds pronounced at the back of the mouth and proceeds to sounds produced at the front.
Because Hindi is highly phonetic, you can predict a word’s pronunciation from its written form.
The Duolingo course focuses on teaching you all of the script first.
Duolingo also has a separate character resource : https://www.duolingo.com/characters
References :
https://omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm
https://www.easyhindityping.com/hindi-alphabet
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-purpo ... s-Sanskrit
https://www.hindivivek.com/hindi-varna- ... short form.
https://alphabetsinhindi.com/how-many-v ... -in-hindi/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
https://blogs.languagecurry.com/article ... nd-vyanjan
https://hindilanguage.info/devanagari/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Devanagari
https://sites.google.com/a/balodyan.com ... -explained
https://www.typotheque.com/articles/dev ... _character
https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/100/wor ... duism.html
https://rajbhasha.gov.in/hi
https://taj.oasis.unc.edu/Hindi.Less.25/wrtingsys.htm