r/Urdu

Maloom hai mujhe, ishq hai usse,

Magar ab usse kaun bataye.

Tamannaa-e-visaal se dil,

Har shab sar-gardaan rehta hai.

Dil ka pinhaan har fasana,

Ab usse kaun bataye.

Khauf-e-hijr bhi hai,

Aur ruswaai ka andesha bhi.

Lafz lab tak aa kar thehar gaye,

Ab usse kaun bataye.

Is darya-e-ishq mein,

Main apni hasti fana kar baitha.

Woh be-khabar hi rahi,

Meri kaifiyat se.

Ab milna bhi muqaddar nahi,

Woh us simt chali gayi,

Jidhar main sirf uski khaatir aaya tha.

Ab usse kaun bataye.

Ye auraaq bhi usi ke naam hain,

Har misra usi ko pukare.

Qalam thak bhi jaaye toh kya,

Qissa adhura reh bhi jaaye toh kya.

Dil har dam yehi pukare,

Ab usse kaun bataye.

-Salwa-

I'm a Japanese American married to a Pakistani currently taking Urdu classes to eventually surprise his family, inshallah. I'm still super beginner but I want to fill my down time with consuming urdu content and getting more used to listening and understanding.

I'm looking for youtubers, podcasts, tv shows, cartoons, literally anything that may be good listening practice! I especially love watching vlogs on youtube and if you know of any women vloggers that speak urdu that would be very cool :)

Here are some of my interests if it helps to narrow down options: travel vlogs, everyday life vlogs, food and cooking, art, graphic design, business, architecture, furniture design, clothing/fashion, trivia, animal and history channels (like natgeo lol), true crime, romance, drama, comedy.

Thank you!!

While being a native speaker, I am still the weakest Urdu speaker in a family where my mom's Urdu borders on Farsi at times.
She's been wanting that I get into Urdu reading (and I wish so too), but her recommendations start and end at Namal, and the rest she considers 'too difficult for me'

So please, can anyone help me find some interesting Urdu books such as travelogues, short stories, novels etc. that I can read over the summer, build my vocabulary, and get more confident in dealing with Urdu. (I don't want to live a life where I say "tumhein pata hai like ye hua", so fluency is something I wish to retain)

Don't get me wrong—Maine Royaan is an absolute masterpiece of modern melancholia. It is beautiful, the vocals are soulful, and it hits right in the feelings. I personally love the song and listen to it on repeat.

But as a urdu speaker, listening to the lyrics carefully was starting to give me an existential crisis. 😂

For those who don't know, the brilliant singer and writer Tanveer Evan is native Bangladeshi. He passively picked up Hindi/Urdu from movies and music, which is why he has an amazing ear for melody, but standard grammar rules completely went out the window.

I assume this is because Bengali doesn't have grammatical genders or the tricky past-tense transitive particle ("ne"), we ended up with a song that flips timelines and genders every three seconds.

Here are the biggest linguistic glitches that were driving my brain crazy:

1. "Maine Royaan" — Slapping a past-tense transitive particle (Maine) onto an intransitive verb (roya), and then adding a Punjabi-ish inflection (royaan). A double-whammy of confusion!

2. "Tujhe dhoonde dhoonde" — Missing the continuous action "t" sound. It should be dhoondte dhoondte or dhund dhund ke.

3. "Main so na pai / Kyun tarpa yun tarpayi" — A wild gender crisis. The song suddenly jumps from masculine to feminine forms in the exact same breath.

4. "Maine kabhi na socha tujhe" — In Urdu, you think about someone (tumhare baare mein). You can't just "think someone" directly!

Also, a special shoutout to the phrase "Yun dil ko sambhalta raha." Since sambhalta is intransitive (for oneself), using it while explicitly pointing to an object (dil ko) is grammatically broken. It needs to be the transitive "sambhaalta" (holding/managing something). The original flat "a" sound just didn't cut it.

I sat down and rewrote the lyrics line-by-line. The goal wasn't to change the track, but to create a version that is grammatically flawless while fitting Tanveer's original melody note-for-note.

Here is the Ultimate (Grammatically Correct) Edition of the song:

───

[Main Roya Corrected Lyrics]

[Chorus]

Main roya tujhe dhund-dhund ke

Roya tha main, tu na milaa

Gehri si in raaton mein

Soyaa naa tha main

Rota tha teri yaad mein, poori raat

[Pre-Chorus]

Maine kabhi na socha tha yeh

Bas roya yunhi khudse

Yun dil ko, yun dil ko

Sambhaalta raha

[Chorus]

Main roya tujhe dhund-dhund ke

Roya tha main, tu na milaa

[Verse 1]

Raat ki gehri neendo mein

Main so na paya

Dard mein yun khudko hi

Kyun tarpa yun tarpaya

Aaa.. Raat ki gehri neendo mein

Main so na paya

Dard mein yun khudko hi

Kyun tarpa yun tarpaya

[Pre-Chorus]

Maine kabhi na socha tha yeh

Bas roya yunhi khudse

Yun dil ko, yun dil ko

Sambhaalta raha

[Chorus]

Main roya tujhe dhund-dhund ke

Roya tha main, tu na milaa

[Verse 2]

Khwaishein jo thi meri

Bas tujhko paane ki

Khaweshein woh hi meri

Bus khawaish hi reh gai

Aaa.. Khwaishein jo thi meri

Bas tujhko paane ki

Khaweshein woh hi meri

Bus khawaish hi reh gai

[Bridge]

Maine kabhi na chora tujhe

Bas roya yunhi khudse

Yun dil ko, yun dil ko

Sambhaalta raha

[Chorus / Outro]

Main roya tujhe dhund-dhund ke

Roya tha main, tu na milaa

Gehri si in raaton mein

Soyaa naa tha main

Rota tha teri yaad mein, poori raat

[Pre-Chorus]

Maine kabhi na socha tha yeh

Bas roya yunhi khudse

Yun dil ko, yun dil ko

Sambhaalta raha

[Chorus]

Main roya tujhe dhund-dhund ke

Roya tha main, tu na milaa

───

Singing Tips for the Cover Artists Out There:

• The Chorus Fix: The original "dhun-de dhun-de" has four soft, bouncy vowel endings. To sing the correct "dhund dhund ke", you just need to drag out the "dhund" sounds slightly ("tujhe dhuuund dhuuund ke") and let the "ke" fall quickly right before the next musical bar hits.

• Squeeze the extra syllable of "raaton" quickly into the pause right after "in". It sounds super stylistic!

• Change his high-pitched, feminine-inflected "tarpay-ee" at the end of the verse to a clean, solid, masculine "tarpayaa".

• Use the long "aa" for "Sambhaalta" to match the slow, heavy tempo of a breaking heart.

Shoutout to Tanveer Evan for giving us a massive banger regardless. Let me know what you guys think of this fix! Did the original lyrics bother anyone else, or am I just overthinking/crazy. 😂

💡 Pronunciation: Mo-sum

🌙 Grammatical Gender: Masculine

📜 Etymology: Urdu noun borrowed from Arabic مَوْسِم (mawsim), meaning a set time, season, or periodic weather condition.

💡 Breakdown: Mausam - Weather / Season / Atmosphere

📖 Context: Establishes the deliberate, suffocating tension engineered by the investigator. The simulated atmosphere of the casino floor serves as an artificial greenhouse designed to break down psychological defenses.

✍ Example: "Shikaari yeh dil hain mausam qaatil hain"

🎵 Song: Badi Dilchaspi Hai (36 China Town — KK & Arya — 2006)

Hey. Native Urdu speaker from Delhi, India here. Growing up, I studied in an English-medium school and studied Hindi till class 10th (Urdu wasn't an option). On top of that, my parents never made a deliberate effort to pass on the language to their children because "learning Urdu in today's age is of no use" (this is said in the context of India btw, Urdu serves as the language of administration only in a few provinces & regions - my Pakistani brothers & sisters might not relate to 'Urdu not yielding economic benefits' as much Indian counterparts do)

Since the lockdown had started, I began on the journey of teaching Urdu to myself from scratch. Now that I'm relatively proficient in it - both reading & writing (and being an avid prose-reader), I've noticed that Urdu novels (and colloquial language as well of course) contain a whole lot of English words, and it is used to the point that it seems as if our own language has no word for that word/phenomenon/event,etc. and I feel really bad about this.

Before anyone brings up this, I do very well understand and am aware of the fact that languages do evolve over time and are never retained in their 'pristine' form, but c'mon, we weren't born yesterday to believe this about the humongous english loanwords that are thwarted onto urdu (and all other languages of the subcontinent btw) - this is very unnatural. The evolution of languages that we normally refer to, is a phenomenon where languages give and take to each other, over a period of time. Apparently with English, firstly because of British colonisation and secondly because of globalisation and emergence of the USA as arguably the sole political and economic superpower - there's only been take, take and take by languages of the subcontinent.

Now, I do believe that nuances exist in this argument. In India specifically, english kind of played a unifying role amongst the hundreds of languages spoken throughout the country, and given the context of mass protests against imposition of hindi as the national language - it was understandable to make english the official language since it was new for all of the people within the country and no group will be disproportionately advantaged/disadvantaged.

So I say this not to sound like an anti-English person, but what I say is that all the native speakers of urdu (or any other language) should have a relatively strong degree of mastery over their own language - and in the context of the topic of this post, I was wondering how language regulators play a role in doing so. Many Asian countries - South Korea, Japan, China, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, etc. - they all have alternatives for modern english terms in their respective languages, even if they do use English loanwords, it's not to the deep extent that Urdu speakers in the subcontinent do. I'm aware that both Pakistan and India have regulators for Urdu, but I was wondering how much actual work do these regulators do in, for instance, translating technical, modern terms in Urdu, so that the common people know about it and make prevalent the use of that word in urdu rather than just copy pasting the English word.

Especially as a novel reader, it pisses me off SO BADLY when literally every other line has an absurd transliteration of some English word that was absolutely unnecessary to use in that particular context. That's why I think that if we (Urdu speakers from both of the countries, and maybe even beyond), make Urdu equivalents of english terms popular, i think it'd do good to both - the language & it's dignity as well as provide an alternative for the young generation of native Urdu speakers so that they'd feel proud of their language ;)

DISCLAIMER - I'm very well aware that in today's globalised world, learning english is inevitable in order to lead a good life. I'm in no way advocating that people should not learn English. What I AM against is the blatant, hyper excessive use of English loanwords in common (as well as academic) Urdu, as if we don't have native words for those things for which we're using the English loanwords. If not, why should not the regulators of the language step in (from both countries), and actively make dictionaries of a sort for all the technical, modern terms in English and respectively enumerate their Urdu alternatives? Basically, native Urdu speakers should be fluent in their language and Urdu should incorporate alternatives for modern terms, just like how Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Turkish and many other Asian languages have done. The question is, what is stopping us, even though we've one of largest speaking populations amongst all languages?

💡 Pronunciation: Jaan

🌙 Grammatical Gender: Feminine

📜 Etymology: Urdu noun inherited from Persian جان (jan), meaning life, soul, vital spirit, or dear one.

💡 Breakdown: Jaan - Life / Beloved

📖 Context: Raises the literal stakes of the scene. The detective uses the casino confrontation to demonstrate that escape is entirely impossible, making it clear to the suspects that their survival and freedom depend on coming clean.

✍ Example: "Mujhse tera bachna meri jaan mushkil hain"

🎵 Song: Badi Dilchaspi Hai (36 China Town — KK & Arya — 2006)

I write ghazals, so this is my first time sharing one of my creations on any social media, and I want people to judge me-if I am bad, then tell me I am bad. But if anyone likes this, please share your feelings with me.

And please read this till the end because IT ACTUALLY STARTS FROM Sher-4, please just read sher 4.

Sehra-e-dhoop mein zulfon ka woh saaya to aaya,

Lab pe mere ulfat ka paigham to aaya.

Hum toh dunya ki nazron mein gumnaam hi marte,

Teri berukhi se hi sahi, thoda sa naam to aaya.

Chalo jala diya usne mere khwaabon ka aashiyan,

Kam se kam meri dunya mein koi kohram to aaya.

Aatish-e-gul mein ek phool khila mere liye bhi,

Khair teri kahani mein mera naam to aaya.

Ishq ki raah mein ruswayi mili to kya hua,

Chalo isi bahaane lab pe ye jaam to aaya.

Bhula kar mujhe woh khud bhi bahut roya hoga

Mere qatl se hi sahi, uspe koi ilzaam to aaya.

Zindagi guzar gayi jiske intezar mein 'Jaana',

Chaukhat pe uski aakhir ye maqaam to aaya