Today, we’re looking at another voiceless and voiced consonant pair: /ʃ/ and /ʒ/.
We’ll look at how to make the voiced /ʒ/ because you’ll hear me better over the mic. Just remember that to make the voiceless /ʃ/ you’re doing the same thing, except not vibrating your vocal cords.
/ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are both fricative sounds, like /v/ from season 2, episode 1. With /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, the friction comes from the front of your mouth, where the tongue, teeth and palate are placed close together, but don’t quite touch. I feel the sides of my tongue raise up to meet my top teeth here, and the tip of my tongue is also tensed upwards, close to but not touching the alveolar ridge (that’s the hard bit behind the upper front teeth). Finally, your lips are flared, or rounded and slightly pushed out. Now vibrate your vocal cords, push air through your mouth, and you should hear the /ʒ/ sound. If you don’t, play around lowering or raising your jaw a few millimetres, or your tongue within your jaw, or pushing your lips out or drawing them in.
So, I do find that my learners tend to be able to make these sounds, but it can be quite tricky to make them consistently in all positions. In particular, as with most of these voiceless and voiced pairs, devoicing of the /ʒ/ is something to be look out for. These sounds can also be easily confused with the /s/ and /z/ sounds as well as the /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ (which we’ll look at next week). In fact, as we’ll see later, there’s some crossover with other sounds for me and many other first language English speakers, too. So those are all things to bear in mind as we go through the words today.
Let’s start by looking at some common words with /ʃ/. The obvious spelling pattern is ‘sh’, but ‘ti’, ‘ci’, ‘ch’, ‘su’, ‘tu’ and ‘ce’, can all make a /ʃ/ sound. Listen and repeat.
1. action
2. actually
3. ancient
4. delicious
5. dictionary
6. dish
7. finish
8. machine
9. she
10. share
11. sheep
12. shop
13. short
14. special
15. sugar
16. sure
And now for some sentences:
- It was actually a delicious ancient dish.
- Be sure to share the special sugar!
- The shop machine finished its action.
Some British English speakers also pronounce the letter ‘s’ as /ʃ/ before a /tj/ cluster, and I am one of them! So, the people I teach are my “students”, rather than my “students”. The same may also happen occasionally for some speakers before a /tr/ cluster (e.g. “stress”) – I don’t think I do this. This does seem to vary from speaker to speaker, and may not be consistent. I wouldn’t advise you going out of your way to do this, but if you notice that you *do* occasionally, don’t worry about it!
And now let’s move on to some words with /ʒ/. There aren’t actually many of these in individual words, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a common or useful sound, as we’ll see in couple of weeks. You’ll notice that many end in -sion, -ure, and that some are loan words from French, where this sound in individual words is much more common! If you’ve previously learnt American English, do you notice the British English equivalent of egg plant and zucchini in the list below?
Listen and repeat.
1. aubergine
2. azure
3. beige
4. conclusion
5. courgette
6. decision
7. genre
8. invasion
9. leisure
10. massage
11. occasion
12. persuasion
13. pleasure
14. television
15. treasure
16. usually
And now for some sentences.
- The beige and azure mix was a great decision.
- I usually eat aubergine and courgette with pleasure.
- In my leisure time I watch many genres of television.
Finally, let’s do just a couple of sentences with a mixture of both sounds.
- She treasures luxury massages on occasion.
- This was actually the conclusion of the ancient invasion.