The Japanese heavy metal group Babymetal has a song called “Babymetal Death”, which is really just them introducing themselves. “Babymetal desu” becomes “Babymetal Death” when sung to heavy metal music.

That transition to the sponsor was a masterclass. Well done

There is a famous story about Marlene Dietrich and her ‘battle’ with English ‘th’. When filming her breakout movie, Blue Angel, in 1930. Dietrich was playing a cabaret singer, and had trouble with lyric with a song that she had to sing in the movie. She just could not get her mouth around the ‘ths’ combination in the line; “Like moths around a flame”. After several failed takes, the director, Josef von Sternberg, solved the problem by having an extra in the movie call out for a waiter at the moment she sang the word ‘moths’, obscuring her voice for a spit second. ‘Blue Angel’ became a classic of European cinema, and the song, ‘Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It)’ became a worldwide hit, and Marlene Dietrich’s signature tune. The poor woman had to wrestle with that English consonant combination for the rest of her life.

I'd be interested in Dr Lindsey speak with ventriloquists about th-s-sh and alternative ways of making them, since I imagine ventriloquists need that skill.

That advert blend was impeccable lol

The more I watch Dr Lindsey’s videos, the more I become frustrated by language education. I’ve come from studying English at a young age to today living in an English-speaking country and no longer considering myself a “learner”, yet throughout the entire time, I was not told how to pronounce “clothes” or “months” and always thought it was my “th” prononciation. Anyone studying English needs to be shown Dr Lindsey’s videos at a very early stage.

It never occurred to me that the finger to the lips when shushing someone is, intentionally or unintentionally, enhancing the potency of the shush.

my boyfriend is french, and although he has lived in america for ~16 years now, he still drops the final -s off of words!! i've always found it really interesting!

TH-fronting definitely is a thing for some non-natives. My French dad once walked into an Indian restaurant in Dublin meaning to ask for "a table for three" but instead requesting "a table for free", which the lady found hilarious.

Oh my goodness, 4:56 was THe Smoothest transiTIOn to an ad I've ever seen

You literally said “it’s just finished” (2:50) like within 3sec of my laundry finishing in the other room

As a native Polish speaker, where we have a triple contrast between "s", "sz" (english "sh") and "ś", I felt like these sounds didn't ever pose a problem for my pronunciation. Polish does not, however, have "th". This led me to coping with it for a long time by saying "dat" or "fenk you". Living in the US right now I feel I've improved at both voiced and unvoiced variants of "th", but I think I still pretty often retreat to "d" and "f" when speaking more quickly. Your video was very helpful for my understanding why my Japanese friends would often baffle me by pronouncing "senk you" where my Polish brain would expect "f".

I am an American from deep in the Ozarks. I pronounce “months” as “munts” and “month” as “munt”. Didn’t realize it until I moved somewhere else. Crazy.

As a French speaker of English, Japanese, and Spanish, who is hypnotized by spelling and scared of th, this video was awesome

I’ve been making the “bottom lip S” this entire time, and I never noticed! I was so confused for 80% of the video because the mouth shapes didn’t look what I was used to doing at all.

there's a kid book (i think it's from the narnia's series) where the protagonist is trying to hide with another person, and they decide to speak without the "s" because they sound too loud even when you're whispering.

The segue to the ad was incredible. I was floored with the smoothness

Dr Lindsey, you’re worth your weight in gold. I was learning RP pronunciation, but gave up when it came to „s” sound. Even though I don’t have a lisp, I just couldn’t do the „s” sound the way the articulators were shown on the mouth cross-section image. I was thinking, either I do have a lisp, or I’m mental, or deaf, but I can’t reproduce the sound the way which is shown, even though I seem to achieve the same effect in some different way... Now it’s all clear, and I even can make the „s” closer to English way ☺️

My English phonetics teacher at uni told me I had a lisp, which completely shocked me. I even saw a speech therapist, who quickly gave up, saying that my front teeth are just hella weird. She made me put the tip of my tongue behind my lower front teeth, which is what all the diagrams show for Czech /s/, but I just can't produce the right sound like that. Made me realize I pronounce the English /s/ when I speak Czech. Years later, job interview at a school. The headmistress says I pronounce the English /s/ when speaking Czech, which is a problem, but that she's willing to overlook it and hire me. Made me self-conscious, so I refused and ended up with a better-paying job somewhere else.

I had some tooth complications and had some teeth removed almost two years ago, and I have braces now. At first I found it really hard to make sibilant sounds without enough teeth near the front of my mouth, but discovered that I could actually use the wire bridging the gap where the teeth used to be as the air blockage point to articulate the sound. My sibilants now honestly sound better than they ever used to before, even if how they're articulated is a little unorthodox.

Also, I recommended you earlier African Grey parrots, they, unlike many other parrots, can make distinction between human sounds at the level of pronounced letters (some can make up new words out of sounds) and transform them to their understanding - and it is remarkable because they don't have the generic human speech adaptation for the specific range of frequency and sequences - resulting in clearly distinct and characteristic identification and reproduction of separate sounds - in particular, "s" is reproduced as loud vowel-type high frequency sound (it appears that most of African Grey parrots who learned to identify separate sounds reproduce it in that way). It is still perceived by humans and parrots as "s", loud and clear "s".

Totally brilliant! Talk about learning things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

Just finished a year in Japan as an English teacher. This video might've been helpful if I'd been able to watch it a year ago!

My linguistics professor in grad school picked up on /sh/ for the s in street when a student spoke in class and correctly guessed her family had come from Britain. I have never forgotten that difference and now I live in the UK and I hear it every single day.

Great video. So many L2 speakers say English is 'easy'. That's only because learners of English are not expected to learn the language to as high a standard as learners of other languages - it's almost a given that you don't have to bother learning the difficult pronunciations. If you actually learn English to a truly high C2 standard rather than just swapping out the bits you can't be bothered to master, it's extremely difficult

I like that it seems like you found a good portion of your clips while watching videos about making UKposts videos. Always encouraging to see people you respect working to improve their craft

More than one of my German colleagues ends up saying "thomesing" for "something". i love what this suggests about the cognitive processes happening for them

2:50 and even "does" or "us" as in "what's he want" and "let's do it"

"What are you sinking about" wahaha

My daughter has gotten over a lisp almost completely, but I was kind of confused why words like "complex" cause her lips to come together somewhat, hiding her bottom teeth, compared to how "dentally" I say it (with very open lips). Only from this video (and having her say some of these words) did I realize that she was using her bottom lip! And not only that, but Dr. Lindsey pointed out that it's even somewhat common. So in a very practical way, thanks for the video; I feel that I need to worry less about this particularity about her speech. Linguistics is way more complicated than it seems!

9:50 - Today I learned that the 12 divisions of the year called "mumfs" are spelled "months".

A fascinating video, as always! I'm a native speaker of American English, married to a native speaker of Venezuelan Spanish. Venezuelans seem to be particularly prone to de-emphasize or sometimes completely drop the final "S" from words in Spanish. And their Spanish is perfectly understandable the way they pronounce it. I've picked up that habit from her when I speak Spanish, while I've tried (with mixed success) to break her of the habit when she speaks English. You've clearly articulated what I knew intuitively but didn't know how to explain: Proper pronunciation of that sound is absolutely vital to carry the meanings of so many English terms. On a related note, my wife neither hears nor articulates the difference between "n" and "m" at the end of English words. I'm frequently trying to fix her pronunciation of "gum"/"gun", "William"/"Willian", "drone"/"drome" and similar pairs, some members of which are not actual words in English. I've heard her sisters and other Venezuelan friends make the same mistakes. I suspect the distinction between those two final consonants is rarely crucial in Spanish.

As a Dutch speaker, I usually replace th sounds with t or d, instead of a sibbilant. I believe that this is what has historically happened to the Dutch language as well, as can be seen in our definite article (English "the" vs. Dutch "de") and demonstratives (English "this" and "that" vs. Dutch "deze/dit" and "die/dat").

Like in the song " 'S Wonderful", you can even cut the "it" out of "it's" and just leave the 's.

Some say the gopher from Winnie the Pooh haunts the nightmares of Dr Geoff Lindsey. And now you’re re-reading this post in the gopher’s voice, whistling each ‘s’…

"sixths" is a fun one. So many ways to (fail to) resolve that "-ksths" consonant cluster. So far as I can tell, I actually tend to lose the s sound from the x, but there are definitely people who lose the th (and then struggle with having two distinctly Seperate S sounds with... nothing in between, because it's obviously not just siks, but there's no vowel in there, but...)

Dr. Lindsey, after watching your video, once again I am left questioning things I took for granted. I consider you a true scientist; you base your thoughts on your own tangible research instead of just echoing what is said by those who are esteemed. You inspire me to trust my own thoughts and dive deep into my own suspicions. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the world.

I remember an ancient Benny Hill (radio!) sketch where he was playing a supposedly French character who spoke in perfect English. When challenged if he was really French he replied "It's hard enough to pronounce all the s's in English, let alone with a French accent"

I often come to these videos with a strong sense of accomplishment in my L2 skills and leave with a profound insecurity that I may insufficiently pronounce something I had never questioned before. Today's video did not disappoint. Especially considering I heard the 's' that supposedly wasn't there in the clip starting at 10:46. I just thought it was retracted like the 'n' before it.

this is the first video i've ever seen from you. i'm hooked

Beyond being important for grammatical purposes, the /s/ phoneme also has sociolinguistic connotations, at least in American English. Hypersibilant /s/ phonemes are associated with femininity, to the point where males who use this phoneme can be perceived as effeminate. This phoneme is made with the tip of the tongue pointing upwards. In contrast, hyposibilant /s/ phonemes are often associated with masculinity, and are pronounced with the tip of the tongue pointing downwards. AAVE is a dialect where this pronunciation is particularly common among both males and females, while other dialects have a prominent gender divide in terms of the pronunciations of that letter. This is very interesting because it also affects mouth posture and the way that some vowels are pronounced.

Thank you for including that clip at the beginning! That has been my favorite ad for 15 years!!

@DrGeoffLindsey You know, we do have a dialect where the s is frequently dropped: AAVE (African-American Vernacular English.) For instance, a person can tell someone about a student continually attending a school: "He go to Duke Ellington." Or, where he lives: "He live 'round Chesapeake St." Or...this little magical sentence about food preferences: "Yeah, he like crabs." The above is an extraordinary example of both dropping an s on a routine action AND adding an s to a word that technically would not use an s to denote plurality. The same applies to ownership: That's Keshia's book: "That (usually pronounced as "dat") Keshia book." It is the coolest thing, and it's so awesome to hear how it flows...or, flow.

Another issue is the voiced/voiceless versions of these sounds. The placement can almost be the same, but the sound differs greatly when the voice is employed versus when the sound is just the sibilant noise of the air rushing through. Spanish speakers in South America do not use the /ð/, /z/, or /ʒ/ and instead use /θ/, /s/ and /ʃ/ for both, and have great difficulty switching on the voice in these cases, since in Spanish they are always voiceless, and sometimes even muted. So, while this was a great video, we need to show those voice/voiceless distinctions, too! :D

0:05 Reminds me of an old Victor Lewis sketch where he calls an electrical goods shop pretending to be a German customer wanting help with a TV that he accidentally poured Blue Nun ("very good, expensive wine") into and is now "very smoking". "and so I put my hand into ze back." "I would switch off the mains first before you put it out." "I do not come from Mainz, I am from Frankfurt." "Switch the electricity mains off!" "Please sir, please.. if I touch the one on the side like this..." *bang!* "Hello? Hello?" "Hello... I was thrown across the room. The television has blown, there is glass everywhere. What is the number of the ambulance, please?" "999" "Why are you saying no to me?"

Fascinating. I have a gap between my upper two front teeth, and when I'm tired I can find my s's starting to slip into th's -- a particular problem when singing. While I've never had a lisp, this video has helped me work out some issues with my s mouth shape and develop some potential strategies for more effective sibilant formation. My singing teacher will be very happY!

I could never understand why so many so many English speakers pronounce 'th' as though it were an 'f'. Eg; wiff, free-two-one, I fink... etc. We regarded it as a speech impediment and always corrected our children when we heard them repeating it from TV or something. Great video with superb content! 👍🏻😎

One of the recent tics I developed is a hiss, which seems to have taken over a clicking sound I used to make. And I tell you no one ever noticed the 'click' but one hiss and I have people looking at me - it's not surprising now that I've learned the 's' is such a loud and distinct sound. A very interesting video, thank you.

I spent years dealing with a mild lisp unable to figure out what to do with my tongue to pronounce s properly. After several years of trying and many searches on youtube i came across a video that explained it as a breathy t which did wonders. I am glad to see the wide diversity in means of making what we perceive as an s.

Dr Lindsey is just brilliant. Thank you.

Related to the 'Articulation' section: a decade or so ago I got a prosthetic device to replace a front tooth that had to be removed (lateral incisor). It's a clever little thing that goes across my palate and fits in a gap on the other side of my mouth. Anyway, my point is that I basically have a false palate from this prosthetic that sits a bit lower in my mouth than my real one and it made pronouncing S really hard for a good few weeks until my tongue got used to it. Now, whenever I take it out, it's equally difficult to pronounce S sounds without it!

I would enjoy Dr. Lindsey crafting several creative sentences for us to submit/tag for review, while including the subject’s home town, teenage town, college town, and parent’s information as well. Map/diagram where changes are happening and the potential influences. Also, include a few tongue-twisters for fun.

I'm a native of California living in Chicago for the past 35 years. The first difference I noticed in the common Chicago accent is the "th" sound being completely left out of all speech, often replaced by a "d" sound, or when that's impractical, with a plain "t" sound, and in "going to da te-ater". The second remarkable feature of a Chicago accent is the final-s sound being lengthened, sometimes to a ridiculous degree--"dat's jusst how it issss"--and sometimes without an "s" being at the end of a word at all. For instance, there's a well-known chain of grocery stores here called Jewel. Chicago speakers often call it Jewelss or even Jewelsess.

I am one of those people who doesn't close their teeth. I always just thought my problem was that my tongue was a little too far forward, but putting it back only ever served to make my s's sound more like sh. Thank you for going so in detail about what's going on in my mouth! I was finally able to make a normal s sound!

I had speech therapy classes as a young child to improve a lisp I have, and I remember being incredibly frustrated at the ways the sounds were being described to me versus what I could and couldn’t pronounce. I remember being advised to move my tongue tip back so far there was nothing in my own mouth to obstruct the air, and being absolutely bewildered that my teacher could hiss just fine “like that”. I eventually improved just by practice, playing a card game where you had to hiss like a snake to score points. Regardless, I feel a lot more vindicated for how I felt during that class after this video - it certainly had a Lot to do with my front teeth, which were nowhere to be found at the time. Ha!

The amount of thought and work that goes into Dr Lindsey’s videos is mind-blowing, and this is no exception. The transition into the sponsor read is, as has been pointed out, nothing short of brilliant. Thank you, Surf Shark and thank you, Geoff!

4:03 "I can't call to mind a single process of English which deletes a final /s/ or /z/ - they're just too important." Unless I'm misunderstanding, isn't AAVE an example? Possessive 's can be deleted, so you get phrases like "my momma house."

I am now trying to figure out how I naturally/automatically make an s sound. It might explain why I was identified as having a slight lisp in Lithuania after growing up (and not being labeled as lisping) in the US.

I have been learning English more than 50 years but nobody ever told me the essential difference in decibels between th and s! Extremely useful information, it solves my problems with that and for many Czech speakers too I think, thanks very much.

I remember asking a Spanish speaking person what English sounded like as a "tune" and they made a droning sound. This made sense in comparison to their own roller coaster language sound. But now i am hearing the impact of the consonants at the end of so many words creating little halts all through the sentences. Especially listening to your British delivery.

the smoothest sponsor segue I've ever seen

8:20 i didn't hear "thin" here, i heard "bin" for some reason. I'll try it again later with a different pair of headphones, and some speakers I've got at home

14:05 Ok this makes sense now. I was listening to a cover of a song called Cinnamon and Clove by a Japanese singer named Ichiko Hashimoto, and it kind of sounded like she was lisping. I’m not really familiar with her music, but this would explain why she pronounced certain words the way that she did. Thanks.

I'd like to thank (fank🤭) Dr. Lindsay. I'm a Brazilian linguage teacher (Portuguese and English). Some of these videos help me a lot to produce more and better English classes to my studants. Cheers from Brasil!

eeh??? 1 minute ago??? my phonetics professor would be amazed to see me get somewhere on time

Woah I've always wondered why my S's whistle. When you showed the diagram at 16:45, I realized that I've always pronounced my S's with my lower jaw relaxed and my tongue resting right beneath my top row of teeth. Lo and behold, when I closed my teeth and made an S sound, the whistle disappeared.

The amount of enjoyment I get from your videos is truly abnormal. Keep going! I find this particular topic fascinating in relation to the pronunciation of Hebrew: comparing modern (always T and D), litvish (T or S, always D), galitzianer, and Yemenite (T,S,D, Th, and Dh) pronunciations, as well as the old Ashkenazi pronunciation which preserved the "th" for the unpointed thuff consonant

fascinating as always! i'm a native speaker of brazilian portuguese and for the first seconds of this video i thought for sure it would be a th! we also use -s for plurals and though brazilian speakers often struggle with words ending in consonants (often pronouncing "it" as "itty" or "lab" as "labby" for instance), s is not one of them. but the th seems to be a bigger struggle - so much so that i find myself willfully mispronouncing it in certain instances to avoid seeming pretentious 😅

Ah, that explains why the manga/anime/film "Death Note" is written in Japanese as "Desu Nōto" (デスノート).

What’s really interesting is that Old Spanish developed both forms of “s” Classical Latin didn’t distinguish s [s] from sh [ʃ] so it only had an intermediate s [s̠]. But by 200AD, people begin palatalizing ce and ci, making a soft C sound. West of Italy, this happens [kʲ] > [c] > [ts] > [s]. In this same region, clusters like [ks̠], [kt] get a palatal squeezed out [js̠], [jt] > [ʃ], [tʃ] So you suddenly have [s] vs [s̠] vs [ʃ] out of thin air. *captiat (“he hunts”), casa (“house”), capsa (“box”) becoming caça [kasa], casa [kas̠a], caxa [kaʃa]. This system collapsed because the sounds are too close in the mouth. Most of Spanish history has been spent trying to move them as far away from each other as possible. This sent [ʃ] even further back, all the way into the throat [x]- ahora escrito como jota. Then in the North of Spain [s] was pushed forward even further until it was [θ] but in the South [s̠] is pushed forward until it’s just [s]

Seriously, this is an absolutely smashing and thoughtful discourse on such a crucial sound.

Fascinating topic. The varied uses of the 's' in English to convey so much additional information means that for those who find it difficult to produce, it can do much more than give them a 'lisp' or make certain words difficult to pronounce. (I was fascinated to discover as a child that my mother wasn't able to pronounce the word anaesthetist. She can produce both sounds separately, but not together. ) If producing the sound (or certain combinations like sth) is so difficult that you mispronounce some words, they're often still recognisable, especially when it's a frequent or common usage. However, I'd never previously stopped to consider that *dropping* them because they're tricky and you think they're not important, can cause you to omit a lot of information, and even alter a communication enough to cause frustration and misunderstanding.

If you've ever since the movie "My Cousin Vinny" (which if you haven't, you should, because it's one of the funniest movies every made) the Brooklyn-born Vincent "Vinny" Gambini (who took 6 tries to pass the bar) is defending his young cousin in a murder case in Alabama. The cousin and a friend are driving out to California to start college and are accused of shooting a clerk in a convenience store where they stopped. (Actually two other kids in an identical car did it right after the cousin and his friend left.) On cross, Vinny asks a witness if he saw "these two youths leaving the store" only Vinny pronounces the word "yoots." The judge stops him to ask "what's a "yoot"?" Eventually Vinny figures out that the judge can't understand his pronunciation and says sarcastically "Oh excuse me your honor!" and then hyper-over-pronounces each sound "these two you-th-ss."

Churchill certainly didn't try to avoid "s" in his speeches, did he? - "From Shtettin in the Baltic to Trieshte in the Adriatic", "Shome chicken, shome neck", "THISH wash their finesht hour!"

THank you for your clarity!

I come to pronunciation via singing, and s is a fascinating sound. It is such a piercing sound that in choir, we sometimes joke that if there is a final s (especially after a prolonged vowel), only one singer needs to pronounce the s and it will sound like we all are. (This also avoids the complication of all of our loud “s”s coming in at a slightly different time 😂)

I remember, twenty-five years ago, reading the Hobbit to my children (before the movies came out) and reading aloud the words spoken by Gollum [oops, I originally said "Golem"] ("my preciousss") and how they got into "Gollum" speak for a while. Did enough 'S' sounds for a lifetime. Yes, the 'S' is preciousss!

Germans often struggle massively with this soft th to s transition. I sometimes recommend them to practice saying the word myths, with the suggestion of starting with the tongue tip between the teeth and pulling it back to form the s. The other major confusion in this area comes between sh and j. I once went to a meeting in Germany about shop jobs and literally could not tell the difference between the words, having to rely exclusively on the context for understanding. No doubt Dr Lindsey can easily explain that one too. Finally, on the s formation, I also had issues with this sound and even speech therapy as a child. In watching this video I realised that I form the s using the teeth and tongue as the constriction with no idea that this might be unusual. I can pull both lips away with no change in sound for the th, s and sh and simply move the tongue in and out to transition between them. I wonder how many others do the same thing.

Love teaching us with your ad reads.

This was an awesome coverage of how essential the consonant is within the language, and how it differs from many other languages. Thanks so much!! 🤩

If I might make a correction, in the examples you chose for Japanese です (desu) and ます(masu), the speakers had strong lisps and wouldn't be considered exactly standard pronunciation. Although the sound is indeed somewhere in between the American English 'mass' and 'math' as you have indicated.

what are you þinking about

So insightful, I love the way you find all these examples across YT as examples. Thank you as always 🙏

I went through speech therapy as a child, because of my s’s. Because I have gaps between my teeth, I would get quite a prominent lisp. Quite honestly, this video has a clearer explanation of what’s going on, and better strategies to get around the physical issue than the therapist ever did, so a big thank you!

twelfths is a fun one to pronounce

I would have guessed "r" is the most important consonant in English, because it's the one that has the most variation from accent to accent. In the past-tense word "cawed" no American sees that "w" as being anything like the "w" that begins "wet". We don't see a consonant. We see "aw" as a way of writing a vowel. But in words like "car" and "marred" Americans always see the "r" as being something like the beginning for the word "red". It wasn't until I started watching this channel that I realize that in some parts of the word the "ar" in "part" is in no way shape or form deemed to contain the initial consonant of "red" as "part" does in my U.S. diction. Many people see "ar" as a way of writing a vowel without a consonant, just as Americans see "aw" in "draw" as a vowel with no following consonant. "R" is the letter that's all over the place in the Anglophone world.

Best ad intro I've ever seen. Bravo.

This was interesting, thank you for the video! I'm Finnish, and I find that here, the English th sounds tend to get simplified into a t (sometimes aspirated, sometimes not) instead of an s. But pretty much all the English sibilants can turn into an s, depending on the speaker, because the unvoiced s is really the only one of them that Finnish has or uses a lot (some loanwords can have the sh sound, but loanwords can be a little weird sometimes anyway, we also get loanwords that break the finnish vowel harmony and stuff like that)

Dutch is another good example of an accent where ‘s’ sounds remarkably like an ‘sh’. Spanish speakers often seem to accidentally say the ‘th’ sound of ‘this’, sometimes spelt as ‘dh’ to distinguish it from the ‘th’ of ‘think’, for a ‘d’ sound despite it not officially existing in their language - they seem to say ‘Madhreed’ or ‘Feliz Navidhad’ for example. I’ve noticed French people who theoretically can’t say ‘h’ say it in an elongated breathy form at the end of the word ‘oui’ (so basically as ‘weehhh’).

7 minutes in and I'm glad to see even university research guys are just using Audacity, same as me 😂

My mind is blown. Thank you for the great lesson, Dr. Lindsay!!

I have never finished a youtube video longer than 20 minutes. Thank you doctor.

There's one thing I think you didn't mention when talking about the encounter of s and th, which is that sometimes people swap the th for a d, like "is dat it" or whenever speaking quickly like "the good, the bad and de ugly". Apart from that, I really liked the video, as a brazilian non-native but with decent English, I enjoy a lot learning more about it. If there were Portuguese captions I could share this with friends that aren't as good on English...

I struggled for several months to learn how to pronounce "physician." Doing so "correctly" was not an issue until I went to college and found myself surrounded by people with PhDs, rather than MDs

Thank you for making these videos. You are my hero

I was on a red-eye flight some years ago and I heard a couple speaking softly to each other a few aisles in front of me. I didn't understand the language, but I got the impression that it was quite sibilant - hissy, like two snakes speaking together. I was *very* surprised when I listened more closely, trying to identify the language, when I suddenly realized it was my own native English - and that I was hearing it the way non-native speakers probably hear the language! 😮🤣 And now I have a better understanding of *why!* Thanks, Dr. Lindsey! 😄

My Korean learners said 'months' as /mun thiz/ inserting a vowel sound.

4:50 How ironic that "sh!" is loud. I wish there were a language were the command to be quiet is something less loud, perhaps even just a glottal stop ;). However, such a command would scertainly be overheard by the adressee ...

Thank you for yet another great video. And yes, guilty as charged, I spend 2.5 to 3 full 90-minute classes teaching the two dental fricatives to my Polish students but rarely the /s/ and /z/ sounds even though I realise they are somewhere between dental and alveolar in Polish, so that using them in English may lead to misunderstandings. By the way, contrary to the stereotype, Polish speakers of English usually do "th"-stopping /t/ and /d/, not /s/ or /z/.

When I saw how you talking about speakers of other languages and the contrast between θ, s and ʃ, I was half-expecting Spanish to make an appearance. You're right that European Spanish "s" is somewhere between s and ʃ, but within Spain it's more of a spectrum. To my ears, the examples you've picked sound very skewed towards ʃ, but there are people who pronounce it the opposite way and it's not really perceived as deviating from the standard. In fact, our former Prime Minister's way of speaking was extremely notorious precisely because he almost only used ʃ. That said, kudos for your pronounciation of the word "más". I had to do a double take when I heard it, it's completely flawless!