English Prepositions for Urdu Speakers

Urdu uses a few small words after the noun where English uses dozens of prepositions before it. This guide maps se, par, mein, ko and tak to the English words you actually need.

Why prepositions are hard when you speak Urdu

Urdu does not use prepositions. It uses postpositions, small words that come after the noun: Lahore mein ("Lahore in"), meez par ("table on"), dost ke saath ("friend with"). The bigger problem is not the position but the count. A handful of Urdu postpositions (se, par, mein, ko, tak) cover jobs that English spreads across dozens of prepositions. So there is no one-to-one translation: se alone can become from, than, with, by, of, to, since or for, depending on the sentence.

That is why the same learner writes "taller from me", "afraid from dogs" and "married with a doctor": in each case the English word was chosen by asking "what is se in English?" The rest of this guide goes through the main postpositions and shows where each one leads you wrong.

se: the source of most mistakes

par: "on", "at", and sometimes nothing

mein: "in", "on", "into", "about"

• bus mein, train mein, jahaz mein becomes on the bus, on the train, on the plane (large vehicles you can walk around in), but in a car, in a taxi.
• Woh kamre mein daakhil hua is "He entered the room", not "entered into the room". (We do say "enter into an agreement", but not for places.)
• Is baare mein is about this: "We talked about it", but see the next section for "discuss".
• Woh musibat mein hai is "He is in trouble."

ko and verbs that take no preposition

Urdu often marks the object of a verb with ko or se: Ali ko phone karo, Us ko batao, meeting mein shirkat karo. Word for word, this produces extra prepositions in English, where many of these verbs take their object directly.

Note the reverse trap: listen, wait and look do need a preposition: "listen to me", "wait for me", "look at this", not "listen me" or "wait me".

tak: "until" or "by"?

Tak covers both "up to a point" and "no later than": Kal tak intezaar karo (wait until tomorrow) and Kal tak yeh khatam kar do (finish this by tomorrow). English separates them, and mixing them up in a deadline is a real-world problem.

Time: at, on, in

Two Urdu habits to watch: subah ("morning") is used with no extra word, so learners say "at morning" instead of "in the morning"; and do ghante mein can mean "in two hours" (from now) or "within two hours", so check which one you mean.

Extra words you can delete

A separate family of errors comes from adding a second word that Urdu keeps for emphasis but English does not need:

A method that works better than memorizing rules

Because there is no reliable Urdu-to-English mapping, stop learning prepositions one at a time and learn each verb or adjective together with its preposition as one unit: afraid of, angry with, interested in, good at, married to, depend on, listen to, wait for. When a correction comes up in practice, save the whole phrase, not just the preposition. Reviewing 5-10 of these chunks a day, out loud, does more than any rule table.

Practice: fill in the blank

Write your answers down first, then open the answers below. Use a dash (-) if no word is needed.

1. I'm afraid ___ dogs.
2. She got married ___ a doctor.
3. He is taller ___ his brother.
4. We discussed ___ the budget yesterday.
5. Please wait ___ me outside.
6. I go to university ___ bus.
7. The meeting is ___ Monday ___ 10 a.m.
8. Submit the form ___ Friday (Friday is the deadline).
9. I was angry ___ him for being late.
10. We reached ___ Karachi late at night.
11. I met her ___ the train, coming back from Lahore.
12. He is interested ___ machine learning.

Prepositions are one of the fastest things to improve through repeated use. In Speak & Fix, every preposition correction can become a flashcard with the whole phrase attached. Start a conversation.