retroflex

* The /ʂ/ sound is actually a laminal retroflex.

The alveolar and retroflex variants, which to my ear give an r sound distinct from, for example [ɑː].

That's why I, with South Asian genetics, am able to speak a language with no voiceless retroflex stop natively without accent.

There is no English equivalent to the phonemes represented in pinyin by j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r or z. English simply doesn't have alveolo-palatal or retroflex consonants.

That's actually closer to the voiced retroflex sound which Indians often use as their 'hard D', articulated further back in the palate, with the tongue rolled back a bit.

We knew, for example, that native speakers of English have difficulty distinguishing the dental and retroflex consonants of Hindi, so the DYM allowed mismatches of those.

So when you say "file" or "fire" these people can't distinguish which one you're saying, and when they say it they use something like the tap [ɾ] or retroflex [ɻ] instead, both of which sound ambiguous to native English speakers.

A large minority has trouble distinguishing retroflex consonants from alveolars.

A perfect spelling was at the top of the list returned from the dictionary, while a misspelling--such as writing a dental for a retroflex--resulted in the mismatched word being a little lower in the list.

There are a variety of allophones that many Hindi-native speakers use in their English that aren't used by most native English speakers outside of India such as the retroflex t, trilled or flap r, and others.

The pharyngealization of the voiced alveolar stop has an effect on the next letter, pulling it from the alveolar lateral approximant [l] to something closer to to the retroflex lateral approximant, [ɭ].

But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative.

Beijing is the biggest influence but Mandarin is really the lingua franca of educated Inperial officials, many of whom would have come from areas where Mandarin doesn’t have retroflex r and of people for whom any variety of Mandarin was a foreign language, learned in adulthood.

Pinyin IPA Articulation Aspirated ch [ʈ͡ʂʰ] postalveolar retroflex Y zh [ʈ͡ʂ] postalveolar retroflex N q [t͡ɕʰ] dual alveolo-palatal Y j [t͡ɕ] dual alveolo-palatal N By contrast, English "ch" is postalveolar but not retroflex, and aspiration depends on context: IPA [t͡ʃʰ] or [t͡ʃ].