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Hindi Challenges 1: Pronunciation of Dental and Retroflex Letters

Correct pronunciation is the most crucial part of learning any language. So, fittingly, the first two challenges I faced while learning Hindi were with pronunciation.

Articulation is the most fundamental thing you have to get right so you can be understood. For the English speaker, Hindi pronunciation takes time to learn because some of these sounds are new to us.

The first issue I faced was Hindi has 4 different T sounds त थ ट ठ and 4 different D sounds द ध ड ढ.

For the English speaker, they’re difficult to pronounce and hear the difference between at first. I’ve never found any single piece of material that helped me get these pronunciations right, so I’m going to try fix that in this post.

tathadadha
Hindi dental letters.
TaThaDaDha
Hindi retroflex letters.
ت
تھ
ٹ
ٹھ
د
دھ
ڈ
 ڈھ
A lot of people follow me who are learning Urdu too, so here are the Urdu equivalent letters for your reference. Ignore this if you’re only learning Hindi.

What are dental and retroflex sounds?

I got my wife, Manisha Malik, to make this video showing how a native Hindi speaker pronounces dental and retroflex sounds and words.

That’s the same question I had. Dental sounds are pronounced with the tip of the tongue behind the teeth. Retroflex sounds are pronounced with the backside tip of the tongue touching the front roof of the mouth. Study the two tongue placement diagrams below.

How to pronounce Hindi dental and retroflex letters diagram.
The tongue placement for pronouncing dental sounds in Hindi.
The tongue placement for pronouncing retroflex sounds in Hindi.

Now that you can see the correct position of the tongue, there’s just one successful way I’ve found to learn these sounds. YouTube lectures and audio recordings don’t work because they’re one-way communication. They don’t give you any feedback on whether your pronunciation is correct or not. Fancy speech recognition software like Rosetta Stone doesn’t help either.

Learning pronunciation of these retroflex and dental sounds can only be accomplished by practising the tongue placement with a native Hindi speaker sitting in front of you giving you real-time feedback.

Even with a native Hindi speaker sitting there, my progress was slow. Initially, I still could not hear the differences between retroflex and dental sounds. I still get it wrong today sometimes. This skill takes a lot of time and practice because the sounds are so similar.

Have your Hindi Guru pronounce the letter, then try it yourself. Do this in a continuous loop. Keep repeating and experimenting with tongue placement until you get it right. It will take time and it will be frustrating, but you will get there.

Even if you can’t get the letter pronunciation 100% correct, I found it easier to pronounce it with a word rather than just the letter alone. Somehow I would more easily get the pronunciation right by saying a full word rather than the letter sound alone. That’s when I discovered to train my tongue to get in the correct positions for pronunciation I could use word lists and pairs. This was the breakthrough I’d been waiting for.

Tip: Out of all the words with the T and D sounds, त and द are by far the most common. If I don’t know the spelling, I just default to those first two and hope for the best.

Dental and retroflex wordlists for practice

The purpose of word lists is to get you familiar with tongue placement while changing between the different letters. Pronounce these words one after the other with your Hindi Guru listening.

You can read downwards to just practice the sound of a single letter and sideways to practice the transition between each letter.

tathadadha
तीखाथालीदिल्लीधन्यवाद
तुमथनदूरधूप
तालाथानादसधोबी
तरबूज़थकादवाधीरे
Hindi dental practice words.
TaThaDaDha
टमाटरठंडडमरूढक्कन
टिक्काठीकडरढाई
टोपीठेकाडालढाबा
टापूठाठडाकूढेर
Hindi retroflex pratice words.

Dental and retroflex words pairs

These are contrasting words to practice with your Hindu Guru. They move your tongue between retroflex and dental positions. Pronounce them one after the other to get your tongue moving between the two locations. Some of these words purposefully sound very similar to try and help you hear the difference.

DentalRetroflex
तीखाटिक्का
थनठीक
दिल्लीडमरू
धोबीढाबा
रोतारोटी
Hindi dental and retroflex word pairs.

When practising and learning the pronunciation of these letters, it’s easy to get frustrated. Study these sounds in short bursts over many days. To get these sounds right, I was meeting my Hindi Guru in the morning for 30 minutes every day just to practice these. With time and repetition, they begin to sink into your head and mouth.

The final thing I do whenever I learn a new word with a T or D sound is I find out what T or D letter it is, and I note it down so that I pronounce it correctly next time.

If my content has helped you, please leave a comment.

By Karl Rock

Karl Rock, is a Hindi speaking Kiwi ex-pat who take viewers behind the scenes of incredible India and its neighbours. He has visited every state and union territory in India, and its culturally similar neighbours – Pakistan and Bangladesh, and aims to make others fall in love with India and the subcontinent.

12 replies on “Hindi Challenges 1: Pronunciation of Dental and Retroflex Letters”

Hey,
I’m glad to find your blog. I’m Australian and learning Hindi. I don’t have a coach, but I do have a bunch of Hindi-speaking friends that I can ask to critique my pronunciation.
I’m working on the sounds first, but I found when listening to Manisha pronounce the dental and retroflex letters, that I can’t even hear the difference. Have you ever seen a minimal pairs list between the Aussie/Kiwi accent and Hindi?

Hey Larissa. Don’t worry too much about it, as long as you know there’s a difference you’ll eventually start hearing it because you know to look out for it. It’s one of those things that just takes a lot of time and you can’t force it or rush it.

Sometimes, when my internet queries land on what I was actually wishing for it seems almost miraculous… and this is one of those times.

Thank you so much for this explanation and the wonderful resource.

I Googled “tongue position Hindi vowels” and this is where it brought me. SO grateful.

Thanks SO much!

“Out of all the words with the T and D sounds, त and द are by far the most common. If I don’t know the spelling, I just default to those first two and hope for the best”

would it be possible to get a bibliographical reference for that ?

Your website and youtube videos are a great resources. Ive found nothing like them for learning the hindi language and about daily life in india. Thanks so much

About two weeks ago I decided to embark on this journey towards learning Hindi and just today landed on your website. Your posts are so inspiring!

Hi Karl,

Appreciate your work to create this site very much! My wife is from Fiji and speaks Fiji-Hindi, so I’ve been quite keen to learn as much as I can.

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