How to pronounce TH

It is not you. The dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ are genuinely uncommon across the world's languages — surveys of phoneme inventories put them in only a small minority of them — so most learners arrive at English having never made the sound in their life. Speakers of Romance, Slavic, Germanic and East Asian languages usually have no equivalent to borrow from, and the ear reaches for the nearest sound it already owns: /s/, /z/, /t/ or /d/.

The consequence is that th is a motor problem rather than a knowledge problem. You will not fix it by understanding it; you fix it by putting the tongue in an unfamiliar place often enough that it stops feeling unfamiliar. Five minutes a day beats an hour once.

For both th sounds the tongue tip touches the bottom edge of the upper front teeth, and air is pushed through the narrow gap. The tongue is visible — if a mirror shows no tongue between your teeth, you are almost certainly making a different sound.

The only difference between the two is voicing. Put a finger on your throat: /ð/ vibrates, /θ/ does not. Everything else about the two is identical.

There is a usable rule. The small, high-frequency grammar words — the, this, that, they, there, then, than, those, though — take the voiced /ð/. Almost everything else beginning with th takes the voiceless /θ/.

In the middle of a word, /ð/ is usual between vowels in everyday words like mother and weather , while /θ/ turns up in more formal or Greek-derived words like method and author . At the end of a word, /θ/ dominates: bath , month , south .

A neat pair to hear the contrast: the noun breath is voiceless, the verb breathe is voiced.

Less than most learners fear. Substituting /t/ or /d/ for th is a standard feature of Irish English, Indian English and New York speech, and millions of people are understood perfectly well doing it. It is worth learning for clarity, but it is not the thing standing between you and being understood — word stress matters more.

To check whether you can actually hear the contrast before working on producing it, the listening quiz includes th pairs.

Read slowly first. Pronounce each syllable deliberately before trying to blend them at full speed. Rushing hides the vowel and consonant shapes your ear needs to learn.

Record yourself. Most phones have a voice memo app — record a word, then compare it to the playback here. Hearing the gap between your version and the model accent makes targeted practice far easier.

Focus on one accent. Jumping between American, British and Australian in the same session creates confusion. Pick the accent you encounter most and stick with it until the patterns feel natural.

Every word above is a button. Set the accent and voice you want on the main screen, then come back — the guides use whatever you chose. To hear two accents against each other, use Compare; to test whether you can actually hear a contrast, use the listening quiz.