> Hindi is spelled phonetically in English, so it’s not very hard.
In my experience it's extremely hard to get right. At one of my jobs pronunciation of Indian words (mostly food and names) was a fairly common topic of conversation and it was impossible for the non-Indians to get correct. To my American ear it usually sounded exactly the same (even if it wasn't me saying it) but they would always say it wasn't quite right.
I think certain sounds are hard for Western speakers to pronounce, while others are easy. Specifically, Hindi (and many other Sanskrit-derived languages) distinguish between some sounds (which have correspondingly different characters in the written script) that are often indistinguishable to Western ears. And if you can't hear the difference, you are unlikely to be able to say it right.
These sounds typically come in groups of four. For example, there are 4 "T" sounds in Hindi: त थ ट ठ. If you pronounce each of these correctly, Indian ears will hear 4 distinct sounds. Western ears will typically hear the same sound 4 times. If they are listening attentively the second time around, they may be able to distinguish at most 2 different sounds, but not 4. Given this, Western speakers are unlikely to correctly pronounce a word containing one of these sounds. The good news is that even if a Western speaker has incorrect pronunciation, in the vast majority of cases native Hindi speakers would be able to understand what was meant.. so the communication still happens effectively. Furthermore, regardless of language, I like to believe that most native speakers will very much appreciate efforts to speak the language, no matter how mangled the pronunciation is.
In that table, त is the first column of the Dental row and थ in the second column of that same row (aspirated?). Similarly, ट is the first column of the Retroflex row and ठ is the second column of that row.
The alveolar ridge is a bit behind the upper front teeth, and sometimes people let blade of the tongue (tip plus a bit) rests against that when making a "t" vs against the teeth themselves.
t̪ - t with square bracket below is the dental plosive
ʰ - superscript h is the aspirations indicator
So there are three issues for English speakers:
A minor issue: English uses apical plosive /t/ for "t" , while Hindi and related use dental plosive /t̪/. This is a small difference in tongue placement. But these sound similar enough. The bigger issue is English lacks a retroflex plosive (tongue curls), and aspiration is non-phonemic (does not carry a meaningful distinction). English speakers typically aspirate leading plosives and don't aspirate in the middle of words. It's not that native English speakers "can't" hear a difference, it's just way more subtle and likely to be missed unless specifically listening for it.
This is fascinating. Thank you for commenting. As an Indian living in the West, I have always wondered why/how certain differences that are stark to my ears are subtle or barely perceptible to others.
The converse is also true. For example, the way native Swedish speakers pronounce seven (sju - example pronunciations at https://forvo.com/word/sju/ ) is 1) Hard for me to say and 2) No matter how I say it, the response from Swedes is, "You said <X>; it's actually <X1>" where both <X> and <X1> sound exactly the same to me, so I don't hear the distinction they are trying to point out. I assumed the same happens to Western folks when Indians/Hindi speakers try to explain the difference between the various T sounds.
> The bigger issue is English lacks a retroflex plosive (tongue curls), and aspiration is non-phonemic (does not carry a meaningful distinction)
But English words do seem to distinguish meaningfully between what you term 'voiceless' and 'aspirated voiceless' isn't it? For example, there is a difference between 'time' and 'thyme'. Ignoring the difference between 'y' and 'i' for a moment, wouldn't both words be the "same" to English speakers if what you are saying is true? Isn't 'th' just the aspirated version of 't'? (Not contesting what you are saying, just curious to understand.)
"Thyme" is odd because it used to be spelled "tyme" in Middle English (1066-1400s). I assume it was changed to 'th' to be more similar to Latin and French. Something similar happened to "island" (iland) and "isle" (ile) where a silent 's' was added to make the words closer to the Latin "insula".
> But English words do seem to distinguish meaningfully between what you term 'voiceless' and 'aspirated voiceless' isn't it? For example, there is a difference between 'time' and 'thyme'. Ignoring the difference between 'y' and 'i' for a moment, wouldn't both words be the "same" to English speakers if what you are saying is true?
Aspiration is not contrastive in English - it's impossible to find two words that differ only by aspiration. Aspirated consonants (in general American English) mainly feature in the onset of a stressed syllable (pin ['pʰɪn], potato [pə̥ˈtʰeɪɾoʊ]) as long as they're not preceded by /s/ (spin ['spɪn]). The important part is that you can determine whether or not a consonant is aspirated only by its position in the word, which is why it's an allophone - a variation of a phoneme which isn't distinctive, but still sounds different. English is my L2 so "thyme" still messes me up, I always try to pronounce it with /θ/ like the first consonant in "thigh".
How people differentiate sounds is actually very interesting. The leading theory is that infants can differentiate all human phonemes (see Jusczyk's Head turn Experiment) but starts categorizing sounds into categories based on what languages are spoken to them by 9-12 months. An interesting language is the (sadly extinct) Ubykh, which had 84 (!) phonemic consonants but only 2 or 3 distinct vowels. For example, speakers percieved /qʲ q qʷ qˤ qˤʷ/ as five different sounds, even though an English-only speaker would probably categorize all of them as just "kinda guttural".
On "sju" (/ɧʉː/) - /ɧ/ is a very odd sound in general. It doesn't really feature in any other languages, and what exactly it should be categorized as is still debated by phoneticians. It also varies a lot by region - Finland Swedes generally don't differentiate the consonants in "sju" and "köpa". So bottom line, we don't know how to pronounce it either :D
> For example, there is a difference between 'time' and 'thyme'. Ignoring the difference between 'y' and 'i' for a moment, wouldn't both words be the "same" to English speakers if what you are saying is true?
But they are the same; both are pronounced (in traditional IPA) as /taɪm/
There is no difference in pronunciation between time and thyme. Both will be pronounced with the same amount of aspiration. Why English maintains a th- spelling for some words of Greek and Latin origin instead of plain t- is a long story, but in English it makes no difference in pronunciation.
This is true even among western languages.
For example, it’s basically impossible for any other western european speaker to say the Portuguese ão sound.
First thing I did in my company, which is mostly German, was to abbreviate my name, instead of having multiple people trying their hardest to call me singing I don’t care for, I chose his I’m called in that context.
Sure, I'm just talking about getting an English equivalent pronunciation. Obviously, you can't sound identical to one language in another language, especially when one language distinguishes sounds that the other doesn't.
In my experience it's extremely hard to get right. At one of my jobs pronunciation of Indian words (mostly food and names) was a fairly common topic of conversation and it was impossible for the non-Indians to get correct. To my American ear it usually sounded exactly the same (even if it wasn't me saying it) but they would always say it wasn't quite right.