Modern technical and digital vocabulary (lesson 29)
SIM cards, data packs, eSewa and Khalti mobile payments, the verbs used to charge a phone or top up data, and how the Internet-era loanwords get absorbed into Nepali.
Public-domain FSI Nepali Basic Course audio, streamed via our server. If the player shows an error, the source file may be temporarily unavailable — try again later.
Modern supplementary lesson (not in original 1979 FSI — added for 2020s usability). Minutes 1–5: SIM-card vocabulary at NCell or Ntc stores — passport requirement, the verb 'haalnu' (to insert / put in), 'data pack haalna paryo' (need to add a data pack). The price drilled around minute 3: 'eutaa sim kati paryo?' (how much for one SIM) — Rs 200 with 28-day data is the typical 2026 tourist plan. Minutes 6–10: eSewa and Khalti — Nepal's two dominant mobile-payment apps, both QR-code based. The Nepali phrase for 'I want to scan the QR' is 'QR code scan garchhu', and the merchant-side question is 'cash ki online?' (cash or online). Minutes 11–14: phone-charging vocabulary — 'mero phone ko battery sakiyo' (my phone's battery is finished), 'charger maagchu' (I ask for a charger), 'wifi password ke ho?' (what's the wifi password). Many of these are loanwords spoken with Nepali grammar — common in modern speech.
Attribution
Audio courtesy of the US Foreign Service Institute (Public Domain) and hosted by Live Lingua. This page links directly to their CDN; we do not re-host or modify the audio.