"Delhi is a city."
Translation:दिल्ली एक शहर है।
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No. Colloquially, people would say शहर.
नगर is a 'tatsam' word which means that it has been borrowed as is from Sanskrit. These words are seen as more formal in modern Hindi^* so you are more likely to see them in written form, in the names of organisations or in formal speech than in conversational Hindi.
^*- As opposed to words borrowed from Persian/Arabic and the other category of Sanskrit-derived words which are called 'Tadbhav'. These are words which have been part of Hindustani and its parent Prakrit languages for longer and have undergone some changes.
I didnt use eek and it was ok. Am I right in thinking that to indians it sounds odd to use eek here? So duolingo is weird in that sense. Delhi is one city instead of a city
It doesn't sound odd.
Hindi does use 'ek' as the indefinite article. (It is actually pretty common for languages to use the word for 'one' as the indefinite article). However, the indefinite article is not used as much as it is in English.
The absence of the article may stand for either definiteness or indefiniteness in Hindi. So, you need to include the 'ek' only when you need to explicitly specify indefiniteness or when you are introducing a brand new topic into the conversation.
For example, you would say 'दिल्ली एक शहर है' to someone who does not have the first idea about a place called Delhi but 'दिल्ली शहर है' to someone who is confused about whether Delhi is a town or a city.
Thanks, interesting. I can somewhat follow, but I wouldn't be able to implement in myself in conversations. Maybe the understanding of it will come on its own with actual real life practice. That's the downside of this duolingo course... it's just single sentences without the context of a larger conversation.
True. Real-life immersion is the best way to familiarize yourself with such intricacies of the language.