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Aspiration, retroflex consonants, and the four-way distinctions English speakers cannot hear at first.
Three features account for nearly every foreign accent in Hindi, and all three are things your first language taught you to ignore.
The first is aspiration. Hindi pairs every plain consonant with an aspirated one — क/ख, प/फ, त/थ, च/छ, ट/ठ — and the difference is a puff of air that changes the word. English has aspiration but never uses it to distinguish meaning: the p in 'pin' is aspirated and the p in 'spin' is not, and no English speaker notices. Hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth; it should move for the second of each pair and stay still for the first.
The second is the retroflex series, ट ठ ड ढ ण, made with the tongue curled back towards the roof of the mouth. There is no English equivalent at all. English t and d land between Hindi's retroflex and dental sets, which means an English speaker saying 'tum' is heard as neither ट nor त — the single loudest marker of a foreign accent.
The third is that Hindi does not reduce vowels. English turns unstressed vowels into a neutral 'uh'; Hindi keeps every vowel at full value. नमस्ते is na-mas-te, three clear syllables, not nuh-mus-tuh. This is why Spanish and Italian speakers sound better in Hindi after three months than English speakers do after a year — their vowels were already right.
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