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How to distinguish th and f sound? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5784 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 9 of 32 01 May 2009 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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th and f are the same sound. I (native speaker) really can't see a difference. Edited by Tyr on 01 May 2009 at 1:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 32 01 May 2009 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Nonsense. They're very similar, and it took me until I was five to I learn to distinguish them, but they're not the same sound. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kubelek Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal Joined 6854 days ago 415 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 11 of 32 01 May 2009 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tyr where do you come from? Perhaps in your area the sounds merged? Frankly, I don't know if such thing is a regional feature, but they are certainly not the same sound, at least in standard English.
As a Pole I had several big phonological issues to fix, 'th' being one of them. In Poland none of my teachers bothered to explain the phonology of the language they've been teaching me for almost ten years. As a result I couldn't distinguish between f, voiced th (as in 'though') and unvoiced th (think). I finally learned it when I was an exchange student in the US. It took me probably two months to realize that there IS a problem, half a year to really learn how to distinguish them without fail, and then another month or so to learn how to pronounce the right sound depending on the word. It is helpful to learn how to pronounce it from a technical point of view - the point of articulation and so on. Listen to minimal pairs (I used native speakers for that), and have your pronunciation corrected eventually. One of the books I used was American Accent Training. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5784 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 12 of 32 01 May 2009 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm from North East England.
The only time I can remotely think of the two being different is perhaps in very standard queen's English (of the ilk that is no longer spoken by many people bar the queen) where everything is pronounced very strange. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wky92hk Newbie Hong Kong Joined 5688 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 13 of 32 01 May 2009 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||
Is that means learn it by hearing different accent? e.g. Japanese ,Indian, German... Do you have website shows these voice? thank you 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| paparaciii Diglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 6338 days ago 204 posts - 223 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian Studies: English | Message 14 of 32 01 May 2009 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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To me 'th' and 'f' sounds completely different.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 32 01 May 2009 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||
That method basically means that a number of native speakers of the target language are recorded repeating similar-sounding words (minimal pairs, like Kubelek said) that are problematic for certain learners. thin - fin for examle Because everyone speaks a bit differently, and everytime you repeat a word is sound just a bit different. So when you hear the word, you have to decide whether you heard 'fin' or 'thin'. But you don't have just two recordings, of which one is longer or sounds a bit louder, so that you can remember 'the louder one was thin', because the next time you hear the same word, it's spoken by somebody else. So you have to actually learn to recognize the th to tell that word pair apart. I couldn't find any website that has minimal pairs with th/f. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Nick_dm Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5715 days ago 24 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese | Message 16 of 32 01 May 2009 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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wky92hk, I wouldn't recomend listening to other non-native accents as they will contain other mistakes. For example Japanese and northern Chinese people will generally say "s" rather than "th", so "thank you" and "Thursday" become "sank you" and "Sursday", others may replace "th" with "t", so "three" becomes "tree". Listening to these accents is unlikely to help you.
I'm afraid I don't know of any websites highlighting the differences. Tyr, merging "th" and "f" isn't that widespread, plenty of people other than the Queen make the distinction! I live in the south London/Surrey area and both "thanks/thursday" and "fanks/fursday" are common. There is a correlation with class but the boundary is far "lower" than you suggest. On top of that I don't think "th-fronting" is particularly common in other English speaking countries. Wikipedia has an article with some details and references - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting 1 person has voted this message useful |
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