Introduction
Like many places in south-east asia, you can find lots of addresses in India . However, the size of indian cities makes it a lot more difficult to find your district and your street.
Addresses
Addresses are quite usual, they go by order of importance : the road, the district, the city, the province, and the 6 digit post code.
Most addresses show you only some of those informations.
For example, this address in Chennaï, capital of Tamil Nadu :
Provinces and biggest cities are the first thing you need to learn.
Provinces and cities
The map of provinces and province capitals :
Province names are written on google map, therefore recognizing the province name in the streetview is good enough, even if you dont know where it is you can find it on the map.
In order to learn provinces, you can use this Seterra quiz.
In order to learn cities, you can use the City quiz.
Languages
The common language is english, hindi is the main language in northern India but there are many other languages. Recognizing scripts is a very good way to find out where you are.
There are 4 language families in India, but if you consider the streetview coverage (as of august 2022), there are only 2 language families : dravidian in southern India, with round letters, indo-aryan in northern India, with a horizontal bar above the words.
Each language family contains different languages :
Tamil
Tamil is spoken in Tamil Nadu province, meaning the Chennaï area.
The script is easy to recognize : many round letters with points above some letters.
Telugu
Telugu is spoken in Hyderabad, the telugu script looks like the kannada script.
There is some kind of wave or checkmark (depending on the font) above many letters :
Kannada
Kannada is spoken in Bengaluru, the kannada script is very similar to the telugu script.
There is a flat shape with a vertical ending at the right on top of many letters.
Gujarati
Gujarati is spoken in Gujarat province, meaning Ahmedabad and Vadodara. It is the only indo-aryan script that doesnt have the horizontal bar at the top of words. You can recognize the S and reverse S shapes.
Maranthi and Hindi
Both languages use the same script called devanagri. There is one letter ळ used only in maranthi, but otherwise it is not possible to tell the difference.
Punjabi
Punjabi is spoken in Punjab province, meaning the cities of Amritsar, Ludhiana and Chandigarh.
In india, punjabi is written in Gurmukhi script. Punjabi is also spoken in Pakistan even though it uses another script there. Gumurkhi script looks like devanagri script used for writing hindi. For me the difference is the "alpha" letter and the triangle like letter that do not exist in devnagri, as well as points above some of the vertical bars.
Post codes
Post codes are both easy to learn and usefull, especially when the city name is not written in english, or when you do not know the where the city is.
Post codes have 6 digits, the first 2 digits are relevant :
You can learn them with the India - post codes quiz.
Geo-guide
Geo-guide provides a complete list of informations on the country : geo-guide India .