the th problem

if you read "ought" and then add a h in front of it you get the "haught" sound. but if you add a t instead of a h, you read "taught" and still hear the "haught" sound. the English "t" already has a "h" sound inside it. if you read "taught" without the h sound you get a tom and jerry pronunciation English does not actually use.

if you read "saw" and slowly slide your tongue inward to the back of your throat and outward into your teeth, you get the range between the "shore" and "thor" sounds. th is a modified s sound, not a t sound!

"awe" does not have a h sound; adding h to it you get "whore" which does have a h sound. but you don't hear "whore" in "shore" or "thor". there is no h in "sh" and "th" - which means "th" has neither t nor h in it!

what about the buzzing th in "thee" instead of "thief"? try making the d and z sounds together - somewhere between "dee" and "zee" you'll find just the right sound for "thee".

now read "zaw" and slide your tongue to the back of your throat you get the "jaw" sound. if you take the buzzing sound out of both you get the "saw" and "shaw" sounds. why isn't "jaw" spelt "zhaw"? And if you did exactly the same thing with "law" you get "raw", which isn't spelt "lhaw".

so what now? i think so many learners struggle with the English sounds because English consonants are intentionally misleading. the letter h doesn't modify the consonant like a shift key on a keyboard - it replaces it altogether like the alt key. which means h could have been x or j and still worked the same!

so why do we hear the t in "the" as much as we do in "thief"? we've been thoroughly indoctrinated and made to think we're the special ones who have made it to the club. English is messed up and so are we.

therefore we need to think of "the" as "dze", "thief" as "sxief", "jam" as "zjam", "shore" as "sjore", "shrill" as "sjrill", "thrill" as "sxrill", instead of being dicks and telling people they aren't hearing it.