You can just call me Nina. ‘Zara’ just happened to be my favourite clothing line when I first became a member of this forum. It has nothing to do with my name.
How do you work on them? Reading aloud? or talking to yourself? One thing I noticed about myself, I like to read signboards aloud since I was small. It used to drive my mother crazy. I still do it though, now with Japanese signboards, because one Chinese characters can have a lot of sounds, you can only pick it through experience. When I get it wrong, my friends would correct me.
Gopal, I think you have to practice a three-way contrast between “z”, “zh” and “j”. They’re three distinct sounds.
If you had trouble with “s” and “sh”, I’m guessing your native language is not Hindi, but probably Gujarati or maybe even Oriya. Can you tell us what it is?
This is very interesting, Tom, thank you. I see that the Hindi speakers in the recordings alternate between [w] and [v], apparently depending on the phonetic context.
The parts about the syntax and word usage are just ordinary aspects of foreigners’ use of English. When Indians displaying those syntactic characteristics get into English classes in the US, they’ll be viewed as simply making about the same errors any other foreigner makes. The problem is usually that when the Indians arrive as adults, these characteristics are so ingrained that they have horrible trouble passing English classes, despite their very large vocabularies.
