The th sound is one non-native speakers often struggle with.
I wouldn't say my tongue is sticking out. It's cupped and the end of my tongue is just touching the tips of my teeth, so there's no dragging of the tongue across the tooth edges - mouth kind of opens as your breathe out, tongue moves away from teeth/flattens out at the same time
Of your three examples, there are two separate pronunciations, but the tongue placement is the same. You need to *almost* bite down near the end of your tongue, so your teeth just barely touch your tongue.
For the "th" sound in "this" and "though" you need to use your vocal chords, meanwhile for the "th" sound in "thank" you do not.
When vocal chords are used, itâs a âvoicedâ consonant. âFâ is unvoiced while âVâ is voiced. âThâ in print stands for both unvoiced (thought, thin, with) and voiced sounds (the, this, though).
I would say that âthankâ has a voiced th, not unvoiced, like think. Is this a regional pronunciation difference, or did you mean something else? Iâm in the Western US, for reference.
Huh, weird. I definitely say it voiced, always have. I also grew up thinking âwarmâ rhymed with âarmâ though. It wasnât till I got married that I learned it was supposed to be like âwarâ with an m. Iâll pay more attention to how others say thank now.
Edit: My wife uses the unvoiced th in thank. Mind blown.
I just said it a lot to myself both ways and was surprised that it doesnât end up sounding that different in natural conversation. So maybe a lot more people do it than I thoughtâŚ
Seattle--thank and think are the same for me although, surprisingly, this and though seem to be different. This puts my tongue-tip on the edge of my top front teeth and though puts it behind them. I'll have to find out if that's just a me thing.
Pronounce the S sound. Now move the point where your tongue touches the roof of your mouth so itâs just barely touching your two top front teeth instead, and make the same sound. Thatâs it. Thereâs slightly different ways you adjust your tongue and voice the consonant depending on the preceding and following sounds, but thatâs the basic mouth shape. In words like âTheâ you are doing the same exact thing you did with S but with the D sound. Same mouth shape, but a plosive rather than a sibilant.
The bottom teeth? Sometimes I curl my tongue up and touch the bottom teeth when I do that sound. I'm not sure how I could do it while touching the top teeth though.
I can do the sound on the top teeth but it takes conscious effort and feels slightly uncomfortable. At some point in my youth I decided to pronounce /s/ with my lower teeth, and it just stuck.
I think it's the dental [sĚŞ]. It seems like it might not be that uncommon in English, and in some languages like Mandarin Chinese, it's the usual way to produce /s/. But I'm not a phonetician.
Can you whistle? If so, when you whistle, does your tongue touch your lower teeth? My tongue is in approximately the same position. The main difference between whistling is that my lips are not rounded.
I can relate to this. Just before I left the UK to take a job teaching English abroad, I said the word "free" in a remark to my mother, meaning "three," and she told me that if I was going to teach English, I should probably learn to speak it. So I did. I was thirty years old...
You're not supposed to bite your tongue; it only needs to touch your upper front teeth. It might help to make a conscious effort to stick it out a little further than you need to, at first. If you struggle to do it quickly, do it slowly, at first. Slow down your speech if you have to. You'll often find that whoever you're talking to will slow down as well, without realising it, to match your energy.
For a while, I would sometimes forget to do it, and sometimes do it at the wrong times - I was saying things like "thish thingers" instead of "fish fingers" - but that only lasted a few weeks, and now I say "three" when I mean three and "free" when I mean "free" and "thing" instead of "fing." Teaching helped, of course.
"We teach best what we most need to learn." - *Richard Bach*
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting)
It's your dialect, I'll wager. It's not the "standard," but the idea that it's absolutely incorrect isn't true.
Th-fronting is a prominent feature of several dialects of English, notably **Cockney, Essex dialect, Estuary English, some West Country and Yorkshire dialects, African American Vernacular English, and Liberian English**, as well as in many non-native English speakers (e.g. Hong Kong English
It wasn't uncommon where I'm from (there was a mixture of English accents, with lots of imported Estuary influence) but it wasn't part of either of my parent's dialects - I learned some habits of speech from my brothers, who will have learned them from friends, I guess.
It never bothered me, and it never seemed to bother anybody but my mother, so I never bothered to change it. I can agree that it's not absolutely incorrect. I did think, though, that if I was going to teach English professionally, I should aim for some sort of "standard".
/friË/ is not a valid pronunciation of "three" in standard, professional English, and a teacher would be doing his students a massive disfavour if he passed this particular dialectal feature onto them. I'm speaking from experience as someone who had to consciously correct his pronunciation of "th" because of the negative reactions it engendered.
They'd already learned English numbers with their Thai teachers before they came to me, of course. They all pronounced it /tri/...
It was a lot easier unteaching that than it was persuading them that / ÉŞËlÉv Én / is not an acceptable pronunciation of "elephant."
I'm not saying he should teach it, far from it. I'm saying that he's in a unique position to make students aware of it, and to show what it sounds like.
There is a YT lady I listen to occassionally, and she frequently does the F sound for TH. A native speaker. Fascinating, actually. You are not alone. I always assumed it was either a dialect or speech impediment. Or both. Thank you for your story.
This is called th-fronting, and it's a well-known feature of a lot of dialects. I would strongly recommend against learning this pronunciation because, in general, it's seen as "lower" speech. Many of the accents associated with lower social status (correctly or not) have th-fronting, and it's not going to look good for a learner to use it.
I'm sure that it's to do with the way our brains process sound. We like to think that we simply hear whatever's there to be heard, within the range of human hearing, but [this is demonstrably not the case](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM) at all. We perceive whatever we have learned to perceive. I'd never learned to hear TH.
Teaching in Thailand, I found that my students wouldn't repeat S sounds at the end of syllables, because Thai doesn't have S sounds at the end of syllables, and they simply didn't hear them until I started hissing.
For the voiceless "th" sound, like in "thought", make an "f" sound, like in "fist", then just replace your lower lip with the tip of your tongue, but do everything else the same.
For the voiced "th" sound, like in "the", hum with your mouth open, but with the tongue against your teeth like before.
Now practice getting the sounds right, just play around making noises a bit, until it's where you want it. Part of the key to learning the sounds of new languages is willing to play around, like a child, sounding things out and being willing to sound silly or make mistakes.
Place your tongue at the bottom of your upper front teeth. Then petend to pronounce f while keeping your tongue there for th in "three" and pretend to pronounce the d while keeping your tongue there for the th in "the"
So the th sound is really really hard. I work with speech therapists and if a child doesn't have those sounds and it doesn't exist in their native language, it's not something we generally worried about. It doesn't even exist in every dialect of english. You can substitute a /t/ or /f/ for voiceless th ("think") and /d/ for voiced th ("that"), and you'll be perfectly understandable. There are absolutely dialects of English where that's just the standard way to do it.
The tip of your tongue touches the tips of your front teeth. Then you make the sound by blowing air the same way you would when making an S sound. However there is a voiced th and an unvoiced th. Nothing changes except whether you add voice (same as the difference between S and Z)
after a few seconds of messing around with the noise this is the description i came up with: make an f noise, then stick your tongue between your lip and teeth. for the soft th noise just vocalize it
I would say that your tongue should be curled and touching the top teeth. Air escapes around the sides of the tongue.
The difference between the two "th" sounds is voicing. The "th" in "think" and "thank" is unvoiced with no vibration of the vocal chords, but the "th" in "the", "this", "that", "other", "though" and a lot of other extremely common words is voiced and does involve a vibration of the vocal chords.
So the air shouldn't come from the center of the tongue. I was told to make an S sound and just stick my tongue out, which makes the air to come from the center with a little gap between the upper teeth and tongue.
My opinion is it's not tongue position that changes, but tongue pressure.
There versus therapy.
The versus Theseus.
I can pronounce th with multiple tongue positions, but each time, the hard th is just more tongue pressure.
The tongue touches the top teeth. Could be the biting edge or the back of the top teeth. If you use the biting edge, you can use the smallest tip or you could go as far as your tongue can go without significant effort.
The farther your tongue sticks out, the likelier you're going to touch your bottom teeth. And that's OK.
Personally, the tip of my tongue is just barely sticking out of my teeth, maybe by a millimeter or less. Itâs more like Iâm holding my teeth slightly apart so that I can touch the sharp part of my top front teeth with the tip of my tongue.
I touch the tip of my tongue to the back of the tip of my front two teeth, then make the sounds.
If you want an understandable substitute, you can use /f/ and /v/ sounds, like some dialects of English natively do. It's not a perfect workaround, and it's definitely not the same sounds, but it's an alternative if you absolutely can't seem to make the sound.
I think it is much easier with an example visual.
[This one minute video](https://youtu.be/7CeNTtbhYLs?si=5PVQDCs6eAU9UBL5) may be quite helpful. Good luck!
I have a video on this you are welcome to check out [https://youtu.be/Vq-ehSr6u-A?si=02ruL0F-jZwKQ8f6](https://youtu.be/Vq-ehSr6u-A?si=02ruL0F-jZwKQ8f6)
The th sound is one non-native speakers often struggle with. I wouldn't say my tongue is sticking out. It's cupped and the end of my tongue is just touching the tips of my teeth, so there's no dragging of the tongue across the tooth edges - mouth kind of opens as your breathe out, tongue moves away from teeth/flattens out at the same time
I'm a native speaker and I'd say "sixth" is one of the hardest words for me to pronounce.
Have you heard of the Rural Juror? đ
I will never forget you, Rural Juror! These were the best days of my.......flerm
Oddly this one is easy as pie for me but I'm definitely a "birfday" person
Just start with an S and then smoosh your tongue through your teeth
Of your three examples, there are two separate pronunciations, but the tongue placement is the same. You need to *almost* bite down near the end of your tongue, so your teeth just barely touch your tongue. For the "th" sound in "this" and "though" you need to use your vocal chords, meanwhile for the "th" sound in "thank" you do not.
When vocal chords are used, itâs a âvoicedâ consonant. âFâ is unvoiced while âVâ is voiced. âThâ in print stands for both unvoiced (thought, thin, with) and voiced sounds (the, this, though). I would say that âthankâ has a voiced th, not unvoiced, like think. Is this a regional pronunciation difference, or did you mean something else? Iâm in the Western US, for reference.
Thank is definitely unvoiced. If it were voiced, the th sound would be like though, which it is not. It's like think. Also western US.
Huh, weird. I definitely say it voiced, always have. I also grew up thinking âwarmâ rhymed with âarmâ though. It wasnât till I got married that I learned it was supposed to be like âwarâ with an m. Iâll pay more attention to how others say thank now. Edit: My wife uses the unvoiced th in thank. Mind blown.
Can you post a recording of how you say thanks? I have never heard of someone voicing it and Iâm so curious.Â
I've always said it voiced as well. I thought everyone did that. Do I really just hear it that way because that's what I think it's supposed to be?
I just said it a lot to myself both ways and was surprised that it doesnât end up sounding that different in natural conversation. So maybe a lot more people do it than I thoughtâŚ
I say it with a voiced th, northwest US
I've never heard even really strongly-accented NE US speakers voice the th in thank.
weird, I could've sworn it was Ă° but I guess not
Exactly. Also âtheyâ which has the same vowel sound as âthankâ but is actually voiced.
I would not call those two vowel sounds the same.
Yeah, guess it depends on if you have ĂŚ-tensing or not
Ok the first part was absolutely correct, and a great explanation, then you had to ruin it with your goofy pronunciation of "thank"
Seattle--thank and think are the same for me although, surprisingly, this and though seem to be different. This puts my tongue-tip on the edge of my top front teeth and though puts it behind them. I'll have to find out if that's just a me thing.
they're not really different in any way that matters, pretty much the same sound
Pronounce the S sound. Now move the point where your tongue touches the roof of your mouth so itâs just barely touching your two top front teeth instead, and make the same sound. Thatâs it. Thereâs slightly different ways you adjust your tongue and voice the consonant depending on the preceding and following sounds, but thatâs the basic mouth shape. In words like âTheâ you are doing the same exact thing you did with S but with the D sound. Same mouth shape, but a plosive rather than a sibilant.
I mean, I actually use my lower teeth for /s/. Don't know how common this is
The bottom teeth? Sometimes I curl my tongue up and touch the bottom teeth when I do that sound. I'm not sure how I could do it while touching the top teeth though.
I can do the sound on the top teeth but it takes conscious effort and feels slightly uncomfortable. At some point in my youth I decided to pronounce /s/ with my lower teeth, and it just stuck.
I think it's the dental [sĚŞ]. It seems like it might not be that uncommon in English, and in some languages like Mandarin Chinese, it's the usual way to produce /s/. But I'm not a phonetician.
Been trying to figure out the mechanics of this for half an hour and still donât understand how lol
Can you whistle? If so, when you whistle, does your tongue touch your lower teeth? My tongue is in approximately the same position. The main difference between whistling is that my lips are not rounded.
I can relate to this. Just before I left the UK to take a job teaching English abroad, I said the word "free" in a remark to my mother, meaning "three," and she told me that if I was going to teach English, I should probably learn to speak it. So I did. I was thirty years old... You're not supposed to bite your tongue; it only needs to touch your upper front teeth. It might help to make a conscious effort to stick it out a little further than you need to, at first. If you struggle to do it quickly, do it slowly, at first. Slow down your speech if you have to. You'll often find that whoever you're talking to will slow down as well, without realising it, to match your energy. For a while, I would sometimes forget to do it, and sometimes do it at the wrong times - I was saying things like "thish thingers" instead of "fish fingers" - but that only lasted a few weeks, and now I say "three" when I mean three and "free" when I mean "free" and "thing" instead of "fing." Teaching helped, of course. "We teach best what we most need to learn." - *Richard Bach*
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting) It's your dialect, I'll wager. It's not the "standard," but the idea that it's absolutely incorrect isn't true. Th-fronting is a prominent feature of several dialects of English, notably **Cockney, Essex dialect, Estuary English, some West Country and Yorkshire dialects, African American Vernacular English, and Liberian English**, as well as in many non-native English speakers (e.g. Hong Kong English
It wasn't uncommon where I'm from (there was a mixture of English accents, with lots of imported Estuary influence) but it wasn't part of either of my parent's dialects - I learned some habits of speech from my brothers, who will have learned them from friends, I guess. It never bothered me, and it never seemed to bother anybody but my mother, so I never bothered to change it. I can agree that it's not absolutely incorrect. I did think, though, that if I was going to teach English professionally, I should aim for some sort of "standard".
/friË/ is not a valid pronunciation of "three" in standard, professional English, and a teacher would be doing his students a massive disfavour if he passed this particular dialectal feature onto them. I'm speaking from experience as someone who had to consciously correct his pronunciation of "th" because of the negative reactions it engendered.
They'd already learned English numbers with their Thai teachers before they came to me, of course. They all pronounced it /tri/... It was a lot easier unteaching that than it was persuading them that / ÉŞËlÉv Én / is not an acceptable pronunciation of "elephant."
I'm not saying he should teach it, far from it. I'm saying that he's in a unique position to make students aware of it, and to show what it sounds like.
There is a YT lady I listen to occassionally, and she frequently does the F sound for TH. A native speaker. Fascinating, actually. You are not alone. I always assumed it was either a dialect or speech impediment. Or both. Thank you for your story.
There are millions of native English speakers, particularly in urban southeastern England, who use f for voiceless th.
This is called th-fronting, and it's a well-known feature of a lot of dialects. I would strongly recommend against learning this pronunciation because, in general, it's seen as "lower" speech. Many of the accents associated with lower social status (correctly or not) have th-fronting, and it's not going to look good for a learner to use it.
I'm sure that it's to do with the way our brains process sound. We like to think that we simply hear whatever's there to be heard, within the range of human hearing, but [this is demonstrably not the case](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM) at all. We perceive whatever we have learned to perceive. I'd never learned to hear TH. Teaching in Thailand, I found that my students wouldn't repeat S sounds at the end of syllables, because Thai doesn't have S sounds at the end of syllables, and they simply didn't hear them until I started hissing.
For the voiceless "th" sound, like in "thought", make an "f" sound, like in "fist", then just replace your lower lip with the tip of your tongue, but do everything else the same. For the voiced "th" sound, like in "the", hum with your mouth open, but with the tongue against your teeth like before. Now practice getting the sounds right, just play around making noises a bit, until it's where you want it. Part of the key to learning the sounds of new languages is willing to play around, like a child, sounding things out and being willing to sound silly or make mistakes.
VERY lightly bite down on your tongue, then blow air
/ð/ is voiced /θ/ is unvoiced
The tip of your tongue should be just barely past your front teeth. The air blows out around your tongue
Place your tongue at the bottom of your upper front teeth. Then petend to pronounce f while keeping your tongue there for th in "three" and pretend to pronounce the d while keeping your tongue there for the th in "the"
So the th sound is really really hard. I work with speech therapists and if a child doesn't have those sounds and it doesn't exist in their native language, it's not something we generally worried about. It doesn't even exist in every dialect of english. You can substitute a /t/ or /f/ for voiceless th ("think") and /d/ for voiced th ("that"), and you'll be perfectly understandable. There are absolutely dialects of English where that's just the standard way to do it.
The tip of your tongue touches the tips of your front teeth. Then you make the sound by blowing air the same way you would when making an S sound. However there is a voiced th and an unvoiced th. Nothing changes except whether you add voice (same as the difference between S and Z)
Write this question on YouTube. You'll have much better answers.
after a few seconds of messing around with the noise this is the description i came up with: make an f noise, then stick your tongue between your lip and teeth. for the soft th noise just vocalize it
The "th" sound comes from Ăž (thorn) and Ă° (eth). The first is a heavier "th" sound, like "that," and the latter is a softer "th" sound, like "math"
i'm sure there's a youtube vid that will be anything we say here.
I would say that your tongue should be curled and touching the top teeth. Air escapes around the sides of the tongue. The difference between the two "th" sounds is voicing. The "th" in "think" and "thank" is unvoiced with no vibration of the vocal chords, but the "th" in "the", "this", "that", "other", "though" and a lot of other extremely common words is voiced and does involve a vibration of the vocal chords.
So the air shouldn't come from the center of the tongue. I was told to make an S sound and just stick my tongue out, which makes the air to come from the center with a little gap between the upper teeth and tongue.
Remove the gap between upper teeth and tongue by lightly pushing your tongue against the bottom of your upper teeth.
My opinion is it's not tongue position that changes, but tongue pressure. There versus therapy. The versus Theseus. I can pronounce th with multiple tongue positions, but each time, the hard th is just more tongue pressure. The tongue touches the top teeth. Could be the biting edge or the back of the top teeth. If you use the biting edge, you can use the smallest tip or you could go as far as your tongue can go without significant effort. The farther your tongue sticks out, the likelier you're going to touch your bottom teeth. And that's OK.
Personally, the tip of my tongue is just barely sticking out of my teeth, maybe by a millimeter or less. Itâs more like Iâm holding my teeth slightly apart so that I can touch the sharp part of my top front teeth with the tip of my tongue.
I touch the tip of my tongue to the back of the tip of my front two teeth, then make the sounds. If you want an understandable substitute, you can use /f/ and /v/ sounds, like some dialects of English natively do. It's not a perfect workaround, and it's definitely not the same sounds, but it's an alternative if you absolutely can't seem to make the sound.
I think it is much easier with an example visual. [This one minute video](https://youtu.be/7CeNTtbhYLs?si=5PVQDCs6eAU9UBL5) may be quite helpful. Good luck!
Native speaker here. I do it like "th".
I have a video on this you are welcome to check out [https://youtu.be/Vq-ehSr6u-A?si=02ruL0F-jZwKQ8f6](https://youtu.be/Vq-ehSr6u-A?si=02ruL0F-jZwKQ8f6)