🇮🇳 Hindi Pronunciation

Practice hindi pronunciation using Web Speech API. Record yourself, get instant feedback on accuracy, fluency, and confidence.

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Word-level comparison

💡 Hindi Pronunciation Tips

🎤 Retroflex Consonants

Hindi has distinctive retroflex sounds. Practice tongue position.

🗣️ Nasalization

Master nasal consonants and vowel nasalization.

📝 Daily Practice

Practice with native speakers for Hindi mastery.

A writing system that tells you the pronunciation

Devanagari is close to phonemic: each character represents one sound, and once you can read the script you can pronounce almost any word correctly. This is the opposite of English, and it means the initial investment in learning the script pays off immediately.

The four-way consonant distinction

This is the feature that most surprises English speakers. Where English distinguishes two sounds, Hindi distinguishes four, combining voicing with aspiration:

	Unaspirated	Aspirated
Voiceless	क k `/k/`	ख kh `/kʰ/`
Voiced	ग g `/ɡ/`	घ gh `/ɡʱ/`

The fourth cell is the hard one. /ɡʱ/ is breathy voiced: the vocal folds vibrate while remaining partly open, producing a murmured quality. English has no equivalent, and substituting a plain /ɡ/ changes the word. The same four-way pattern applies to the t, d, p, b, ch and j series.

Dental and retroflex

Hindi has two full sets of t and d sounds, and English sits between them, which is why English speakers are heard as using neither correctly.

Dental त t, द d: the tongue touches the back of the upper teeth. Closer to Spanish or Italian t than to English.
Retroflex ट ṭ, ड ḍ: the tongue tip curls back to touch the roof of the mouth, giving a distinctly "thick" quality.

English /t/ is alveolar, between the two. Hindi speakers hear it as closest to the retroflex set, which is why Indian English is often described as having retroflex consonants.

Other features worth knowing

व is /ʋ/, midway between English v and w, with less friction than either. This is why the English v and w contrast is difficult for Hindi speakers.
Nasalisation is marked by the chandrabindu or anusvara and changes meaning: hai (is) against hain (are).
The inherent vowel — every consonant character carries an implicit short a unless another vowel is marked. It is usually dropped at the end of a word, so कमल is kamal, not kamala.
No articles and relatively free word order mean pronunciation carries more of the communicative load than in English.

Stress and rhythm

Hindi stress is weak and largely predictable, falling on the heaviest syllable near the end of the word. Rhythm is closer to syllable-timed than English, so syllables are more even in length and vowels are not reduced to schwa the way they are in English. Transferring English reduction into Hindi is one of the most audible learner errors.

In-depth Hindi guides

Each guide covers one part of the sound system in detail, with audio examples and a practice drill.