Did I pronounce the unvoiced "th" sound accurately? And is it normal for the sound to have a hissing quality, as the "s" sound does?

Did I pronounce the unvoiced "th" sound accurately? I have no idea whether I did so; that sound is barely perceptible to me.


And is it normal for the sound to have a hissing quality, as the "s" sound does?

I'm afraid it's such a poor recording that I have absolutely no idea what words you were trying to say.

I think you did!
Were the words "think, mouth, booth"? That's what I heard!

More importantly, the TH sound has a lot of variations, the accent for it really depends on where the person comes from and grows up.
In some places, it has an "S" quality like you mentioned, in others it's more of an "F".
Usually you are going to have at least two variations in each place: a stronger one, used in words that are easy to pronounce and carry a lot of important meaning in the sentence, and one that is simpler and faster to pronounce, usually in the middle of a word or the end of it. For example, in "birthday" the TH sounds like an F (for the general north American accent), but in "think" they make the sound you made, a more "clean" TH. This changes from place to place, but yours was good!

leruiz said:

I think you did!
Were the words "think, mouth, booth"? That's what I heard!

More importantly, the TH sound has a lot of variations, the accent for it really depends on where the person comes from and grows up.
In some places, it has an "S" quality like you mentioned, in others it's more of an "F".
Usually you are going to have at least two variations in each place: a stronger one, used in words that are easy to pronounce and carry a lot of important meaning in the sentence, and one that is simpler and faster to pronounce, usually in the middle of a word or the end of it. For example, in "birthday" the TH sounds like an F (for the general north American accent), but in "think" they make the sound you made, a more "clean" TH. This changes from place to place, but yours was good!

Click to expand...

"Think, mouth, and both" were the words.