English pronunciation for Indian speakers: clear speech, real lines

Practise one line now

Open the V and W exercise

The exercise opens on one line from William McRaven’s talk at 2:03: “No one was over five foot five.” It has W in “one” and “was”, V in “over” and “five”, and F in “foot”. Listen, record your version, then open Compare and play your take beside the original. No account is needed, and recordings stay on your device.

What Sada can and cannot tell you

Sada checks which of your words came across and how your timing compares with the speaker. It does not grade individual sounds, stress or pitch. When a feature makes another word (vest → west, asked → ask), that word may show as missed. When it does not, as with a retroflex T, the recogniser usually hears the right word, so a matched word does not prove every sound in it was the one you aimed for.

Judge the sounds by ear: play your take next to the speaker. To hear one word on its own, use a dictionary with audio such as Cambridge’s pronunciation dictionary; for sound-by-sound feedback you need a teacher or a tool that scores individual sounds.

Clarity, not a “neutral accent”

Every speaker’s first language shapes their English; in India this is often called mother tongue influence, or MTI. It is not a fault. Indian English has regular patterns of its own, and they differ by region and by first language: a speaker of Tamil and a speaker of Hindi do not bring the same habits.

No accent is neutral. Courses sold as “neutral accent training” usually teach an American or British model. You do not need one to be understood, and you will keep some accent whatever you practise. A more useful goal is clarity: the listener in another country, on a call or in an interview, gets every word first time.

Research on English between speakers of different first languages points the same way. Jennifer Jenkins’s Lingua Franca Core counts as essential the puff of air on P, T and K at the start of a word, keeping consonants at the start of words, and stressing the word that carries a contrast; it counts the TH sounds themselves as not essential. The table below follows that idea: what can change the word comes first.

Which features change the word

The features, one by one

1. V and W

Many Indian languages have one sound where English has two: a soft V made with the lower lip near the top teeth, without friction (written [ʋ]). So “wet” and “vet” can sound the same, more in some regions than others. English keeps them apart. For W, round your lips as for “oo”, with no teeth touching. For V, rest your top teeth on your lower lip and let the voice buzz through. Say these pairs: vest, west; vine, wine; verse, worse; veil, wail; vet, wet.

“Your whole world changes over night.”

Josh Kaufman · 0:27 · Practise this line →

W in “world”, then V in “over”: lips rounded for the first, top teeth on the lower lip for the second.

“In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves.”

Shawn Achor · 10:24 · Practise this line →

“we’ve” has both sounds in one word: W at the start, V at the end. Then V in “every” and “improves”.

More V lines, with F, in V and F pronunciation.

2. P, T and K: the puff of air

Hindi and many other Indian languages tell apart aspirated and unaspirated stops, like प and फ, but in Indian English P, T and K are usually unaspirated. English puts a small puff of air after P, T and K at the start of a stressed syllable: “pin”, “top”, “kill”. Without it, a listener used to the puff may hear B, D or G. Hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth and say “pin”: it should move. After S there is no puff in English either: “spin”, “stop”, “skill”. That part you already have.

“Anybody go shopping and put on a pair of pants this week?”

Ivan Joseph · 4:37 · Practise this line →

A small puff of air after the P of “put”, “pair” and “pants”, the start of a stressed syllable.

“But that hasn't stopped me from getting stuck in slow-boiling pots, so I started studying why.”

Adam Grant · 1:29 · Practise this line →

No puff after S: the T of “stopped”, “stuck” and “started” is unaspirated in English too. Then listen for the puff on the P of “pots”.

The full guide, with the paper test and minimal pairs: P and B pronunciation.

3. Retroflex T and D

Many speakers, especially in the north, make English T and D with the tongue tip curled back behind the ridge, as in ट and ड. English T and D are made with the tip flat on the ridge just behind the top teeth. Listeners usually understand either, so this is lower on the list than it sounds; work on it once the features above are steady. Feel where your tongue touches when you say “today”, then move it forward.

“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it.”

Steve Jobs · 0:47 · Practise this line →

T in “today”, “to”, “tell” and “that’s”, made with the tongue tip on the ridge behind the top teeth.

“How can you get fired from a company you started?”

Steve Jobs · 6:09 · Practise this line →

T and D at the ends of words: “get”, “fired”, “started”. The K of “can” and “company” has a puff too.

4. TH

Major Indian languages have no TH sound, so TH is usually a dental T or D, made with the tongue against the top teeth, aspirated in the north and unaspirated in the south. Listeners almost always understand, and the Lingua Franca Core treats TH as optional. If you want the English sound, put the tongue tip lightly against the edge of the top teeth and let air flow out without stopping it: voiceless in “think”, voiced in “this”.

“The other thing that they had in common was this:”

Brené Brown · 9:43 · Practise this line →

The voiced TH of “the, other, that, they, this” and the voiceless TH of “thing”.

“And this entire situation, with the three characters -- this is the procrastinator's system.”

Tim Urban · 9:56 · Practise this line →

“three”, not “tree”, inside a longer line.

Which words take which TH, with five more lines: TH sound practice.

5. Z and J

Most Indian languages have no Z (Marathi, Assamese, Kashmiri and Urdu are among the exceptions), so Z is often said as J, and “zero” sounds like “jero”. Z is S with the voice on: the same tongue, the same hiss, plus a buzz in the throat. J starts with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth; Z never touches. Pairs: zest, jest; raise, rage; seize, siege. Many plurals and common words end in Z: “is”, “was”, “days”.

“I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.”

Angela Lee Duckworth · 0:14 · Practise this line →

J in “job”, twice; Z at the end of “was”. And a V in “very”.

“and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich.”

Robert Waldinger · 0:34 · Practise this line →

J in “major”, Z in “was”: two different sounds, side by side.

6. Rhythm and the short “uh”

Indian English is usually spoken with a syllable-based rhythm, each syllable taking about the same time. English is stress-timed: the stressed syllables come at a fairly even beat and the ones between them shrink. The British Council’s note on syllable-timed languages says learners from such languages tend to give unstressed syllables equal stress. In English, most unstressed vowels become a short “uh”, the schwa: the first sound of “about”, the A of “sofa”. Saying the vowel as it is spelled, as in “sanity” with a full I, keeps every syllable long. In Sada this shows up as falling behind the speaker, the one part of rhythm Sada does measure.

“Not missiles, but microbes.”

Bill Gates · 0:59 · Practise this line →

Two strong words, “missiles” and “microbes”; “but” is short and quick between them.

“Management is not a tree, it's a television set.”

Dan Pink · 13:08 · Practise this line →

“a” is a short “uh” both times, and “it’s a” goes by fast. Count the strong syllables, not all of them.

7. Word and sentence stress

Every long English word has one syllable said stronger, longer and usually higher. In some Indian languages a stressed syllable is lower in pitch, and a stressed syllable said lower can be harder for a listener from elsewhere to hear as stressed. Check the words you use most at work in a dictionary: the mark ˈ comes before the stressed syllable. In a sentence, the word that carries the meaning or a contrast is the one to make strong.

“So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses”

Shawn Achor · 3:57 · Practise this line →

Four long words, four stress patterns: ecoNOMics, staTIStics, BUSiness, psyCHOLogy.

“It isn't what they do, it's who they are.”

Sir Ken Robinson · 3:46 · Practise this line →

Sentence stress: the contrast is “what they do” against “who they are”, from a British speaker.

Rules that hold, with noun and verb pairs: word stress practice. Strong and weak words: sentence stress.

8. Consonants at the end of words

English stacks consonants: “strength”, “asked”, “texts”. Some speakers add a vowel to break a cluster up (“school” as “ischool”), and many drop the last consonant when speaking fast. Listeners can often cope with a simplified cluster in the middle or at the end of a word, but not when the dropped sound is a grammar ending: “asked” becomes “ask”, “books” becomes “book”. Listen for those endings in your take: a dropped grammar ending changes the word, so it can show as a missed word in Sada’s result.

“is the strength and the warmth of their connections to others.”

Robert Waldinger · 6:23 · Practise this line →

Three consonants at the end of “strength” and “warmth”, and the S of “connections” and “others”.

“Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years,”

Dan Gilbert · 3:19 · Practise this line →

The -sked of “asked” and the -xt of “next”: drop the ending and “asked” becomes “ask”.

When -ed is T, D or “id”: -ed endings pronunciation.

Ten minutes a day with Sada

1. Listen and repeat (2 minutes). Open one line from this page. In Repeat mode, listen twice, reading the caption, then say it after the speaker. Slow it to 0.75× if it is fast.
2. Shadow (3 minutes). Switch to Shadow mode and say the same line with the speaker, a moment behind, three or four times, until you keep up without reading.
3. Record and compare (2 minutes). Record a take, then open Compare and play your recording and the original. Pick one feature from this page and listen for that only. Review words and timing; Sada does not grade individual sounds.
4. Type it (2 minutes). Open the same line in Type it mode, for example “No one was over five foot five.” as dictation: hear it, type it and check it word by word. Typing shows whether you hear “we’ve” or “was” where the speaker says it. More in English dictation practice.
5. Keep a daily line (1 minute). Open the 30-day path: five real lines a day, easy talks first, and a missed day is simply continued. How it works: the 30-day shadowing challenge.

Work on one feature a week, in the order of the table: V and W, then Z, then endings, then the puff of air, then rhythm and stress. At the end of the week, record the same line again and play the two takes one after the other.

Keep going

For more real sentences from short to long: listen-and-repeat practice. For everyday sentences, from greetings to thanks and questions, said by real speakers: daily use English sentences. For a wider plan, with word stress, -ed endings and the weak vowel: how to improve your English pronunciation. On how much accent to aim to change: how to reduce your accent in English. To see what Sada checks in every take: the pronunciation checker. The same kind of page for other groups of learners: English pronunciation for Arabic speakers and English pronunciation for Spanish speakers.

Sources: the features of Indian English (V and W, aspiration, retroflex T and D, TH, Z, rhythm, the spelling vowel, clusters) from Indian English; syllable timing and its effect on learners from the British Council’s TeachingEnglish; which features matter most between speakers of different first languages from Lingua Franca Core; word pronunciations from the Cambridge Dictionary.