# ESL folks who can't pronounce "th"
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [March 11, 2015, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745 "2015-03-11T08:32:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/1 "2015-03-11T08:32:04Z")
Why are some furriners totally unable to pronounce the “th” sound, in spite of the fact that it’s not terribly complicated (Just rest your tongue against the tips of your front teeth . . . and blow)?
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### Author:  [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/2 "2015-03-11T08:44:21Z")
> [@panache45](#):
>
> Why are some furriners totally unable to pronounce the “th” sound, in spite of the fact that it’s not terribly complicated (Just rest your tongue against the tips of your front teeth . . . and blow)?
Because it doesn’t exist in their language?
Honestly, I can say the same thing about several sounds most English-speakers can’t pronounce.
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### Author:  [@jezzaOZ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jezzaOZ)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/3 "2015-03-11T08:44:53Z")
> [@panache45](#):
>
> Why are some furriners totally unable to pronounce the “th” sound, in spite of the fact that it’s not terribly complicated (Just rest your tongue against the tips of your front teeth . . . and blow)?
A very similar question is why most furriners and especially Anglo Americans are completely incapable of using standard Chinese tonal intonation.
The answer is all in the progressive wiring of the brain during early learning of language.
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### Author:  [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 8:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/4 "2015-03-11T08:50:17Z")
Both the voiced and voiceless version of the th sound are rare in other languages. They are often the last sounds that children acquire when they grow up speaking English. They are often changed to other sounds in certain dialects of English. You may think that they are simple, but looking at all other languages that doesn’t seem to be true.
> **[Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8th%E2%9F%A9)**
>
> In English, the digraph ⟨th⟩ represents in most cases one of two different phonemes: the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (as in this) and the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (thing). More rarely, it can stand for /t/ (Thailand, Thomas) or the cluster /tθ/ (eighth). In compound words, ⟨th⟩ may be a consonant sequence rather than a digraph, as in the /t.h/ of lighthouse.
> In standard English, the phonetic realization of the dental fricative phonemes shows less variation than for many other English co...
> **[Voiced dental fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative)**
>
> The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the th sound in father. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or \[ð\] and was taken from the Old English and Icelandic letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced (inter)dental non-sibilant fricative. Such fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth (as in Received ...
> **[Voiceless dental fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative)**
>
> The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in think. Though rather rare as a phoneme among the world's languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential ones. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨θ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is T. The IPA symbol is the Greek letter theta, which is used for this sound in post-cl...
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### Author:  [@Teuton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Teuton)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 9:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/5 "2015-03-11T09:17:33Z")
> [@jezzaOZ](#):
>
> The answer is all in the progressive wiring of the brain during early learning of language.
This. When we grow up, we develop a “toolkit” of phonemes from the languages spoken around us and that we learn to reproduce as we learn to talk. As **Wendell Wagner** notes, the “th” sounds are often among the later ones that children grow to use.
If you don’t hear “th” sounds growing up, it’s very difficult to add it to your toolkit later, as the mechanics of speaking are very sub-concious - you don’t ‘think’ about how you arrange your mouth to create the various sounds as you do it.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 10:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/6 "2015-03-11T10:06:48Z")
Why are all you forn types incapable of pronouncing more than one click consonant, two at most. Ya’ll can manage a basic |, maybe a ||, but not a ʘ, ! or ǂ.
It’s not terribly complicated…:rolleyes:
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### Author:  [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/7 "2015-03-11T10:26:37Z")
I blame the ter’rists
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### Author:  [@iljitsch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iljitsch)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/8 "2015-03-11T11:21:02Z")
In order to make a sound yourself, you must first be able to hear it.
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### Author:  [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 11:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/9 "2015-03-11T11:41:11Z")
When I took Spanish in college I was unable to do the rolled R thing. Plus, I felt like an idiot even trying.
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/10 "2015-03-11T12:18:46Z")
People who speak languages that have the bilabial fricative, which is what the “bh” in Siobhan is, probably wonder why the hell Americans can’t say it, an substitute the labio-dental fricative (V).
People who speak languages with a glottal fricative (the “Ch” in Chanukah) wonder why some people think it’s odd or difficult, or else they overemphasize it.
On the other hand, a lot of people find the English R very hard if they are learning Engliash as adults.
The fact is, that when you speak a foreign language, you are not saying the sounds of the other language precisely (unless you go to speech therapist); you are saying the sounds in your own language that are closest to the sounds of the second language. That what an “accent” is.
My father wanted his Russian to be impeccable, so he went to a speech therapist when he was living in Leningrad, and studying at the university there for his master’s degree. My mother grew up speaking Slovak as well as English, and because Slovak is so much closer to Russian, when she speaks Russian, she has a Slovak accent. My father began studying Czech in his 40s, and spoke it with a Russian accent.
People who can’t say a sound probably eventually could learn to, but it takes work, and it’s not the most important part of being understood, or sounding intelligent. Most people would prefer to work on spelling or verb tenses.
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### Author:  [@Hermitian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermitian)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/11 "2015-03-11T13:23:16Z")
> [@Teuton](#):
>
> This. When we grow up, we develop a “toolkit” of phonemes from the languages spoken around us and that we learn to reproduce as we learn to talk. As **Wendell Wagner** notes, the “th” sounds are often among the later ones that children grow to use.
>
> If you don’t hear “th” sounds growing up, it’s very difficult to add it to your toolkit later, as the mechanics of speaking are very sub-concious - you don’t ‘think’ about how you arrange your mouth to create the various sounds as you do it.
> [@iljitsch](#):
>
> In order to make a sound yourself, you must first be able to hear it.
I know this is the standard answer, but it still leaves me scratching my head.
I can make (and hear!) lots of sounds with my mouth and throat that are not standard in English. Little boys do this for years.
In order to make that sound, it may take intention focus to do so. I am betting that most ESL speakers who are not good at making the “th” sound sat down all day (with someone that could make the sound) and studied how to make that sound with their mouth, they could. As the OP mentioned, it is literally just putting your tongue against your front teeth and blowing. You can even make the sound continuously as it requires no subsequent muscle movements.
I think the difficulty is in being able to rapidly/accurately make that sound while talking. That is harder and takes very intentional and focused practice - in other words, speech therapy. Most ESL learners have much better things to do with their time like studying, making a living, and raising a family. I think most people understand that and don’t hold an accent against them.
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### Author:  [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/12 "2015-03-11T14:06:30Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#):
>
> Both the voiced and voiceless version of the th sound are rare in other languages. They are often the last sounds that children acquire when they grow up speaking English. They are often changed to other sounds in certain dialects of English. You may think that they are simple, but looking at all other languages that doesn’t seem to be true…
True, not all English dialects preserve these sounds. Obvious examples are [“Norf London”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting) and “da hood”.
This also apparently happened hundreds of years ago to most of the Germanic languages. English and Icelandic were unaffected, at least in the prestige dialects, but most everyone else mutated the th sounds to something else, typically D. So the German pronoun “du” is actually a cognate of English’s “thou”, “danke” is cogate to “thanks”, “durch” to “through” (English, of course, having lost the “gh” sound in most dialects), and the German definite articles (der, das, die) are cognate to “the”.
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### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/13 "2015-03-11T14:31:50Z")
> [@Teuton](#):
>
> This. When we grow up, we develop a “toolkit” of phonemes from the languages spoken around us and that we learn to reproduce as we learn to talk. As **Wendell Wagner** notes, the “th” sounds are often among the later ones that children grow to use.
>
> If you don’t hear “th” sounds growing up, it’s very difficult to add it to your toolkit later, as the mechanics of speaking are very sub-concious - you don’t ‘think’ about how you arrange your mouth to create the various sounds as you do it.
Children’s brains are wired more flexibly wrt acquiring sounds. At or around puberty, the brain starts to hard-wire the phonemes and learning to pronounce new ones can be anywhere from difficult to near impossible.
> [@bob\_2](#):
>
> I blame the ter’rists
I blame zee terrorists.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/14 "2015-03-11T14:45:15Z")
> [@kayaker](#):
>
> When I took Spanish in college I was unable to do the rolled R thing. Plus, I felt like an idiot even trying.
Same here. I grew up knowing the trilled r. Somewhere along the way, I lost it. To this day, I can’t trill my r’s even though I was able to effortlessly do so as a kid. Weird. So I have to sub a quick double flapped r or something to try to get that ‘rr’ sound.
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### Author:  [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/15 "2015-03-11T15:15:04Z")
Thai lacks ‘th’, ‘sh’, ‘zh’ and even terminal ‘s’. When I was teaching English I told students their difficulty with English arose from their shyness! To say ‘th’ you show your tongue. To speak a sibilant you may risk spitting!
Of course Thai has sounds unfamiliar to Americans. When a Thai shouts ‘nguu’ and starts running, slow-witted Septimus may have to ask “Is that ‘nor nuu as in rat’ or ‘ngor nguu’ as in snake’?” :smack:
A common nickname in Thai is ‘Noi.’ It was only recently that I learned there are two _different_ nicknames ‘Noi’, both meaning ‘small’, with only a tonal difference.
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### Author:  [@iljitsch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iljitsch)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/16 "2015-03-11T16:01:16Z")
> [@Hermitian](#):
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > In order to make a sound yourself, you must first be able to hear it.
>
> I know this is the standard answer, but it still leaves me scratching my head.
>
> I can make (and hear!) lots of sounds with my mouth and throat that are not standard in English. Little boys do this for years.
Maybe I should have said “categorize” instead of “hear”. A lot of Dutch people will pronounce “think” as “sink”. Obviously they hear the th sound. They probably hear that it doesn’t sound quite like the s sound. But they categorize the sound as within the normal variation of s sounds, and when they have to say it themselves use their standard s sound.
Like the joke “he doesn’t have a lisp, he’s Spanish!”. In Spain the c is pronounced as a th while everywhere else it’s pronounced as an s. If you only know one Spanish person you might think they have a lisp rather than recognize that they purposefully use the th sound.
I’m Dutch and I can say the th just fine. However, it is a bit tricky in certain situations, especially when the th follows an s. For some strange reason I grew up using the rolling r, even though that’s not a common way to pronounce the r in Holland. I later started using a “normal” r. But it helped me pronounce Spanish better.
What is the English r people are having trouble with?
If somehow people allowed me to experiment on a bunch of young kinds, I would have them learn to sing songs in lots of different languages from native speakers in order to train their language capability. Actually teaching them languages that they aren’t going to use immediately is a waste of time, as they’ll forget those and they’ll learn much faster when they’re older anyway.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/17 "2015-03-11T16:14:27Z")
> [@iljitsch](#):
>
> What is the English r people are having trouble with?
Either the [alveloar approximant or the retroflex approximant.](http://dialectblog.com/2011/02/18/the-wild-world-of-the-english-r/) It’s pretty usual, in my experience, for the “r” sound to be substituted with a foreign speaker’s “local r,” usually something like an alveolar tap or trill, but it can be a guttural r or similar, too.
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### Author:  [@Diceman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diceman)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/18 "2015-03-11T16:35:16Z")
> [@Teuton](#):
>
> This. When we grow up, we develop a “toolkit” of phonemes from the languages spoken around us and that we learn to reproduce as we learn to talk. As **Wendell Wagner** notes, the “th” sounds are often among the later ones that children grow to use.
Is the “v” sound one of the later ones, by any chance? My 5-year-old son speaks very well, but whenever he says “of” (as in “slice of bread”) it sounds like “uf.” I’m trying to think of any other words with V that he might have said, but right now I’m drawing a blank.
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### Author:  [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/19 "2015-03-11T17:15:08Z")
> [@iljitsch](#):
>
> Obviously they hear the th sound. They probably hear that it doesn’t sound quite like the s sound. But they categorize the sound as within the normal variation of s sounds …
Cite? Something computers and subconscious brains frequently do is _thresholding_, replacing x with 0 or 1 according as x is greater than some threshold.
For example, Thai has a an unvoiced/unaspirated ‘t’ unfamiliar to English speakers. Those unfamiliar with Thai may think they hear, depending on speaker, either a “normal” aspirated ‘t’ or a voiced ‘d’. What they _won’t_ notice is that they’re hearing a new consonant different from the ‘t’ and ‘d’ they’re familiar with.
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### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2015, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/esl-folks-who-cant-pronounce-th/714745/20 "2015-03-11T19:28:35Z")
> [@kayaker](#):
>
> When I took Spanish in college I was unable to do the rolled R thing. Plus, I felt like an idiot even trying.
I was like that too . . . until years later, when I got an upper denture. All of a sudden, my Rs trilled off the tip of my tongue effortlessly.
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