# Something I hadn't realized about the /th/ sound in English, for ESL students **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 2, 2022, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780 "2022-02-02T05:52:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2022, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/41 "2022-02-04T21:08:43Z")
I think I might be misremembering, (I have the worst memory for names), the names may have actually been “Shawn” and “Sean”, which would make more sense. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2022, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/42 "2022-02-05T03:12:51Z")
> [@Esturionette](#): > > Minimal pairs are all well and good, but sometimes you need a good helping of just one phoneme to really immerse yourself in it. That is one of the methods but in my experience it seems to help more with pronunciation rather than hearing, which minimal pairs seems to be more effective. I mostly teach younger children so anything which is “boring as hell” isn’t particularly useful for that age, but minimal pairs lead themselves to games really well. One year I was teaching at a couple of kindergartens , teaching each class once or twice week. I had almost 150 students and only a handful could constantly differentiate between “bed” and “bad” before we started focusing on that. > [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Also not that as you go through the sequence ha, hi, he, ho, ?u, the lips get closer and closer as the vowel moves further back until, for Japanese at least, the lips nearly touch. Interesting. However, the vowel sequence is a, i, u, e and o, with a as in father, i as in the second i in Hawai’i, u as in blue, e as elephant, and o as in boat. ---
**Author:** ![UDS1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e47774/32.png) [@UDS1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS1)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2022, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/43 "2022-02-07T00:48:43Z")
> [@Frodo](#): > > I think I might be misremembering, (I have the worst memory for names), the names may have actually been “Shawn” and “Sean”, which would make more sense. Yes, “Shawn” is just a transliteration of the Irish name “Seán” using English orthographic conventions. And the Irish name “Seán” started out as a transliteration of the Norman French name “Jean” using Irish orthographic conventions. ---
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2022, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/44 "2022-02-07T16:21:18Z")
Yup, I checked my emails from that time and they Sean and Shawn. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2022, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/45 "2022-02-09T19:06:29Z")
I hate those with a passion, too! I wish a standard like the NATO phonetic alphabet would come into general use, because it would make spelling difficult names much easier. And did anyone else besides myself pick a quirky or funny email address many years ago, because you never imagined you would have to spell it out to people, or manually write it onto a form? Similarly, I’d like to see the same idea used for numerals. “One” can be misheard as “nine” for example. A welcome alternative to this is online chat, but not every business offers it. For instance, why can’t airlines use this so you’re not stuck on the phone waiting to change a flight? ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2023, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/46 "2023-04-09T05:34:05Z")
When I was teaching Conversational English for a private company in Japan (Takaoka, 1995) I already knew from my linguistics training that certain sounds were going to be difficult to distinguish. For some reason or other the school had a special session at the beginning of the year@ and we offered little ‘crash courses’ for interested students to take. My offering was a work-week’s worth of minimal pairs drills, five different hours in which the group (students encouraged by my fellow teachers who recognized the students needed this focus) practiced pronouncing words with sounds that are particularly difficult for them to enunciate. The school had a box with dozens of 5" x 7" cards# of drawings and pictures of all sorts of things. I would choose a handful of cards and tell the students what was on it. To emphasize /e/ I would show them a mattress and have them repeat “bed” and then show them a crimson square and have them repeat “red” and show them a picture of a vagrant and have them repeat “Ed” and so on. It took a while. I didn’t want to dwell on any particular person and slow down the class (or embarrass anyone), so I had a big half-circle of students sitting around me and I’d go from left to right to give each person a chance to repeat the word. Whether they pronounced the phoneme correctly or not, I’d move on to the next person. When I got to the right end of the circle (sideways line, I guess) I’d start over at the left end, skipping over the people who had pronounced the word correctly, and give people additional chances to pronounce the word. Once the whole class got it, I’d emphasize my contrasting phoneme with a new set of pictures. Once they had both, I’d give them a sentence that emphasized the minimal pair, writing it on the whiteboard above a couple picture-cards and having them repeat it. For the distinction between /æ/ and /e/ I showed them a picture of a woman and said, “This is Beth” and had each person repeat “Beth” and then showed them a photo of a free-standing claw-footed tub and said “This is a bath” and had each person repeat “bath.” By the end of the hour everyone had the distinction right and could clearly enunciate “Beth is taking a bath.” The next day I’d work on another minimal pair: This picture of a fish\* is a bass. Repeat “bass.” This picture of a vehicle is a bus; repeat “bus.” At the end of the week, I put specific picture cards in sequence on the whiteboard tray and wrote a tongue-twister% above the cards: _After Be **th** caught the ba **ss** , she rode a bu **s** home and took a ba **th**._ –G! @I think the high-schoolers were doing special exams and attending tutorial courses in lieu of regular classes at school, as well. #or something close to that in metric measurements \*Actually, I think that was a picture of a rainbow trout. Fortunately, nobody argued the point. %They did seem to love doing tongue-twisters, so this was ultimately a set of games with a very specific focus. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2023, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/47 "2023-04-09T09:14:34Z")
> [@TokyoBayer](#): > > There is a great deal of difference in people’s ability to hear and pronounce sounds and some people can never eliminate their accent while others are better at learning how to sound more like a native. My wife (from Japan) has lived in the US for 30+ years, and speaks English with almost no Japanese accent. I also have a Japanese friend who has been living in the US for about 30 years, and while he’s got excellent English fluency WRT grammar and vocabulary, his Japanese accent is extremely thick. So yes, it certainly does seem to vary weight from person to person, and even with long exposure/practice, some folks just don’t lose much of their native accent. ---
**Author:** ![Nars\_Glinley](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nars_glinley/32/8177_2.png) [@Nars\_Glinley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nars_Glinley)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2023, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/48 "2023-04-11T14:28:28Z")
> [@TokyoBayer](#): > > I read the theory years and years ago, so I could have some details wrong, but all infants can hear and distinguish any two sounds. However as the child gets older and their brain develops, the ability to distinguish unused sounds disappears. (Around five to six, IIRC.) Because Japanese only has limited “l” and “r” sounds, native Japanese lose the ability to distinguish between the two. For example, most untrained Japanese actually cannot distinguish between “flight” and “fright.” . I remember reading something similar with Japan and the Native American codetalkers during WW2. In addition to not understanding the languages, they literally could not hear and distinguish the sounds that were being made. ---
**Author:** ![UDS1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e47774/32.png) [@UDS1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS1)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/49 "2023-04-12T00:13:34Z")
This isn’t unique to Japanese-speakers; it’s true of everyone. You can see this phenomenon in action when you hear somebody who speaks a different language from you, or even a different variant of the same language, attempt to imitate your accent. They produce sounds which, to your ear, are easily distinguished from the sounds that you produce but, to their ear, the sounds are identical. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/50 "2023-04-12T00:21:28Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > So yes, it certainly does seem to vary weight from person to person, and even with long exposure/practice, some folks just don’t lose much of their native accent. Anyone who has ever heard Henry Kissinger who was 15 when it came to America would agree with this. My ex-wife had a talent for mimicking languages. When she was in France, she learned one sentence “I can’t speak French, can you say that in English?” and she said it well enough people thought she was joking. > [@Nars\_Glinley](#): > > I remember reading something similar with Japan and the Native American codetalkers during WW2. In addition to not understanding the languages, they literally could not hear and distinguish the sounds that were being made. I’m not surprised. I had a lot more difficulty with Chinese than I did with English and one of the reasons is that there are more sounds in the former that are not in English, where pretty much most of the sounds in Japanese can be found in some English word. Trying to learn a language just by listening to people talk over a WWII era radio would not be easy. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/51 "2023-04-12T01:16:10Z")
I have pointed out the difference between ‘th’ in ‘think’ and ‘the’ to many Americans who have spoken English their whole lives and it is quite difficult to get them to understand that they pronounce the words differently. Speakers of other languages usually like the idea of knowing this little tidbit that never came up in their English classes. Some of them have had a tough time trying to pronounce the two forms though. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/52 "2023-04-12T04:43:40Z")
It’s interesting that all (I believe) English words that start with a voiced “th” are structure words like articles, conjunctions, demonstratives, etc. such as than, that, the, them, this, those, and though. Unless I’m mistaken, there are no nouns, verbs or adjectives that begin with a voiced “th”. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/53 "2023-04-12T05:54:59Z")
Art thou sure of that? ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/54 "2023-04-12T05:56:30Z")
Never mind, doing a bit more research. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/55 "2023-04-12T06:06:19Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Art thou sure of that? Not 100% sure, but if you’re trying to provide a counterexample, neither “thou” nor “that” is a noun, verb or adjective. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/56 "2023-04-12T06:55:48Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > It’s interesting that all (I believe) English words that start with a voiced “th” are structure words like articles, conjunctions, demonstratives, etc. such as than, that, the, them, this, those, and though. Unless I’m mistaken, there are no nouns, verbs or adjectives that begin with a voiced “th”. I was thinking about this theme last Thanksgiving when I was at the theatre to hear a theocratic thespian, a theanthropical threnodist. On the way home I stepped on a thorn or a thimble, and now my toe throbs. 😉 One thing that can be definitively stated, however, and I say this based on personal experience: there is a reason that the “th” sound is called a dental fricative. When I had what I thought was a chip in a front tooth (it actually turned out to just be a broken filling) I sounded just like the gopher from Winnie the Pooh … 😁 [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/EMAi5C23irM/maxresdefault.jpg "Best Moments Of Gopher From Winnie The Pooh Ep 07") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMAi5C23irM) ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 7:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/57 "2023-04-12T07:26:52Z")
I was under the impression that ‘thou’ and ‘that’ are pronouns, and that pronouns are nouns. ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/58 "2023-04-12T10:59:48Z")
Not the same thing. A pronoun was made to take the place of a noun. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/59 "2023-04-12T11:46:36Z")
> [@Pazu](#): > > It’s in Xhosa, apparently. [isiXhosa Tongue Twisters (alphadictionary.com)](https://www.alphadictionary.com/fun/tongue-twisters/isixhosa_tongue_twisters.html) > > And as a complete aside, now I know where the author Dafydd ap Hugh got the title for his story, “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk”. (Fun scifi story, full of wordplay.) …Huh, I just read that story, and I hadn’t even realized that the title was a reference or wordplay at all. > [@Frodo](#): > > I think I might be misremembering, (I have the worst memory for names), the names may have actually been “Shawn” and “Sean”, which would make more sense. OK, that’s quite plausible. Both of those spellings are used by English-speakers, and while there might be some English dialect somewhere that pronounces them differently, they’re at the least very close to each other. > [@markn\_1](#): > > It’s interesting that all (I believe) English words that start with a voiced “th” are structure words like articles, conjunctions, demonstratives, etc. such as than, that, the, them, this, those, and though. Unless I’m mistaken, there are no nouns, verbs or adjectives that begin with a voiced “th”. I’ve noticed that, too, and it’s puzzling. It’d be one thing if the use of that sound at the start of a word were completely foreign to English, like “ts” or “mb”. But those structure words prove that English-speakers have no difficulty with starting a word with that sound. We just… don’t. And yeah, in some senses, a pronoun is a kind of noun, but they also fall into that category of “structure words”, more a part of the grammar of the language than of the vocabulary. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2023, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780/60 "2023-04-12T13:41:33Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > Not the same thing. A pronoun was made to take the place of a noun. Some authorities argue that pronouns are a subclass of nouns. (Which is how I personally tend to look at them.) Some examples of both sides of the argument here: > [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-i-hadnt-realized-about-the-th-sound-in-english-for-esl-students/958780.md?page=4)