Hindi · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "धीमा" in Hindi?

Q: How do you pronounce धीमा in Hindi?

धीमा is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /d̪ʱiː.maː/. It means “slow.” DHEE-maa — the opening dh is a dental stop that is voiced and breathy at the same time.

DHEE-maa — the opening dh is a dental stop that is voiced and breathy at the same time.

धीमा /d̪ʱiː.maː/

dheemaa

The breathy release stretches the opening beyond what its vowel alone would occupy, giving the word a front-heavy feel. That extra time is aspiration rather than stress, and it must not turn into a louder syllable.

Listen: धीमा

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Sound it out

dh ध puts three demands on you at once: the tongue tip on the upper teeth, the vocal folds already buzzing, and a sigh of voiced breath escaping on release.

ee Long ई, tense and clear, taking the breathiness from the consonant into its first moments.

maa A bilabial m opening into a long aa, which also carries masculine agreement.

Hear it in a sentence

आज ट्रेन धीमी है।

Aaj ṭren dheemee hai.

The train is slow today.

Listen: आज ट्रेन धीमी है।

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"Aaj ṭren dheemee hai" switches the adjective to the feminine dheemee, because ṭren is a feminine loanword, and ṭren itself opens with a retroflex ट inside a cluster. So the sentence pairs a curled-back tongue with a teeth-contact breathy stop.

Where English speakers slip

Two substitutions dominate: a plain English d, which loses the breathiness, and an alveolar tongue position, which pushes the sound toward retroflex ड. Both must be corrected together. Sigh audibly while voicing a d made on your teeth, and the sound arrives.