LingoDrop
Hindi · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "लेकिन" in Hindi?
LAY-kin, with a flat long e in the first syllable and a genuinely short lax i in the second.
lekin
The first syllable is heavy with a long vowel and the second is light, giving a falling shape; this is the reverse of the more common Hindi pattern where the long vowel comes last, and getting it right stops the word sounding like lekeen.
Listen: लेकिन
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
यह अच्छा है, लेकिन महँगा है।
Yeh achchhaa hai, lekin mahaṁgaa hai.
It is good, but expensive.
Listen: यह अच्छा है, लेकिन महँगा है।
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
"Yeh achchhaa hai, lekin mahaṁgaa hai" repeats hai on both sides of the conjunction, which Hindi does not consider redundant. Mahaṁgaa contains a nasalized vowel in the middle, so the second clause has both a nasal vowel and an unaspirated g to manage.
Where English speakers slip
The second vowel is where it goes wrong: English speakers lengthen it to "lay-keen," which changes the vowel phoneme. Keep it as short and lax as the i in "kin," and make sure the final n is dental, made on the teeth rather than the ridge.