บ And ป Speaking And Listening

[Silurian]

I am having the most difficult time with speaking บ and ป differently. My girlfriend says I say them the same even though I try to make the B and the BP sounds. I also have a hard time telling them apart when I listen. Is there some trick to making these two sound different?

I'm finding it extremely frustrating.

[BambinA]

บ - sound like book bike bank boom bee brat lol

ป- sound like picnic prego panama (s)pooky (s)poil (s)peak

[fluxweed]

I am having the most difficult time with speaking บ and ป differently. My girlfriend says I say them the same even though I try to make the B and the BP sounds. I also have a hard time telling them apart when I listen. Is there some trick to making these two sound different?

I'm finding it extremely frustrating.

I know it's difficult for westerners.. i had this same problem teaching my french friend to speak.

it is better to compare ป to พ and ผ

because บ is clearly the sound of B in english. but ป พ ผ are P sounds.

for ป , the lips are pressed harder together when speak.. it's the hard 'p sound , the same sound as when you pronunce 'p' in the words 'speak, space, spirit, spark, etc..' in English. or 'p' sound in Italian and Spanish.

for พ and ผ, the lips are closed loosely as in the normal sound of 'p' in the word 'peak, pet, park ,etc. ' พ and ผ are both the normal 'P' sound but they have different tones in Thai. พ is mid tone, ผ is rising tone.

Edited March 8, 2006 by fluxweed

[steveromagnino]

You may never be able to hear the difference, but you can certainly learn how to say each properly.

The idea of picnic etc is closer to bp, but still not right either. picnic = por พ

Like D ด and Dt ต you have to make the physical shape of mouth.

b บ= gently push lips together so just touching, and say the suond without pushing too much air through

bp ป = push your lips hard together and even roll them inwards so it is a good seal. Then push the air into some pressue and then say the sound. It will probably be louder as a result, and a lot harsher in sound.

Exaggerate to the max, until it sounds right, but is over the top. Then back down until you can get the volume the same.

[Silurian]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I guess they way I say my B's in english is closer to the bp sound so I really need to learn to separate the B out. It will take practice. I was trying to keep the ป away from the P sound since the girlfriend says that isn't quite right either.

The listening skill will hopefully come in time.

[gburns57au]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I guess they way I say my B's in english is closer to the bp sound so I really need to learn to separate the B out. It will take practice. I was trying to keep the ป away from the P sound since the girlfriend says that isn't quite right either.

The listening skill will hopefully come in time.

Try this...

Bar as in the beer bar....

Bpaa as you would say to a baby.....

then apply it to By (english) and Bpai (thai for go)

simple trick but it works...

[skylar]

You will find that it is easy to say ป, if you can make popping noises with your mouth.

[steveromagnino]

Try this...

Bar as in the beer bar....

Bpaa as you would say to a baby.....

then apply it to By (english) and Bpai (thai for go)

simple trick but it works...

I have tried this, and it might be a regional accent thing, because my b's come out the same both ways....

The popping physical mouth shape thing is the important bit.

[Tarragona]

for ป , the lips are pressed harder together when speak.. it's the hard 'p sound , the same sound as when you pronunce 'p' in the words 'speak, space, spirit, spark, etc..' in English. or 'p' sound in Italian and Spanish.

That's always seemed to be the easiest way to get it for me. Think of words like 'speak', 'space', 'sport' etc and notice how the 'p' is different from the 'p' in 'picnic', 'pound', 'pick'. It doesn't have the aspiration, the puff of air, when it follows 's' in English. The 'p' in 'speak' is ป, and the 'p' in 'put' is พ. If you can pronounce 'picnic' or 'Pepsi' the Thai way then you're using ป.

Interestingly enough, research done on native English speakers found that when they listened to words like 'speak' with the initial 's' cut off, most identified the 'p' as 'b' (Thai บ).

Edited March 10, 2006 by Tarragona

[withnail]

I would say that so far steveromagnino's advice has been by far the best, that it's definaetly more about the shape of your mouth and the pressure you apply. Comparing the saounds of English words is in my opinion not a good idea when you consider that in this thread so far we have English speakers from at least three countries.

I had a similar problem before with ด and ต and used to get very annoyed when my Thai teacher was telling me that my D's were wrong. The reason being that I (and pressumably many other British people) pronounce a D quite sharply. I now say ด with my tongue further back in my mouth than I would when I say D and never have a problem.

Remember especially when being taught by a Thai person that if they learnt English in Thailand from a Thai teacher they do infact use Thai letters to say English words. An example off the top of my head would be Pepsi which in Thai is ป or bp.

[Johpa]

There is no easy way for an English speaker to learn to here and speak the unvoiced stops without aspiration. My best advice is to focus on their English phonetic usages.

The phonetic sound of the Thai letter /ป/ is the same as the phonetic sound as the English letter /p/ when it comes after the letter /s/ in words like spot, spit, spat, etc. Hold up a thin sheet of paper in front of your mouth and contrast the amount of aspiration, the breathiness if you will, between syllable initial /p/ and the /p/ that follows an /s/ in the following pairs:

pat spat

pit spit

pot spot

Work on trying to lessen the amount of air so that your /p/ begins to sound more like the /p/ in the second colum of words. That is the sound of /ป/. The same practice goes for the other unaspirated unvoiced stops such as /ด/ and ka kai.

Better to learn to use the old AUA transliteration system of marking the aspirated unvoiced stops (k, t, p) as "kh, th, and ph" rather than using things like /Dt/ which leads to confusion between voicing as opposed to aspiration. Back when, we would learn via transliteration the sequence "ka kai, kha khwaay...".

By the way, the shape of your mouth is identical for articulating /ป/,/ พ/, and / บ/. the difference is in voicing (using your vocal cords) and aspiration (breathing out more air). Could be worse as I have been told that Korean uses 3 levels of aspiration.

[Richard W]

By the way, the shape of your mouth is identical for articulating /ป/,/ พ/, and / บ/. the difference is in voicing (using your vocal cords) and aspiration (breathing out more air).

Actually, there is some variation in the shape of the mouth. The following quote, lifted from Crows and the Glottalic Theory, from Ladefoged & Maddieson's The Sounds of the World's

Languages (pp50-1) discusses the differences betwen, inter alia, English /b/ and Thai /บ/:

The physiological position for modal voice can be regarded as one in which the arytenoid cartilages are in a neutral position for speech, neither pulled apart nor pushed together (Stevens 1988). The vocal folds would be very slightly apart, if there were no air flow. We assume that the same position as occurs in ordinary voiced vowels and in voiced continuant consonants such as nasals is normally maintained in stops that are phonologically voiced. It is well known that in some

languages, English being a familar example, the vocal folds may not vibrate throughout the closure for a voiced stop. Even when surrounded by other voiced sounds, such as vowels, the vocal fold vibration often ceases shortly after the closure is made and only resumes shortly

after the closure is released. Most English speakers appear to leave the vocal folds in a constant position throughout such a sequence, but passive devoicing occurs as the supralaryngeal pressure builds up behind the oral closure. There area number of maneuvers that can be made to assist the continuation of vocal fold vibration during an oral stop closure by expanding the size of the cavity behind the location of the closure; these include a relaxation of the cheeks and other soft tissues around the oropharyngeal cavity so that the pressure will passively expand the volume, as well as active gestures, such as moving the articulatory constriction forwards during the closure, moving the root of the tongue forwards, lowering the jaw, or lowering the larynx (Hudgins and Stetson 1935, Bell-Berti 1975, Ohala and Riordan 1979, Keating 1984c). Some English speakers utilize such

gestures to a sufficient degree to produce vocal fold vibration during their voiced stop closures (Westbury 1983), but similar gestures are often executed by speakers producing intervocalic phonologically voiced stops without sustained vocal fold vibration (noted by Kent and Moll 1969). Flege (1982) has shown that the variation in the time at which vocal fold vibration starts near the release of utterance-initial voiced stops in English does not depend on how long before the release the vocal folds are adducted. The target for voiced stops in English can therefore be said to include the maintenance of a position of the vocal folds appropriate for voicing, but not to require the employment of other strategies to sustain vocal fold vibration.

In contrast to English and several other Germanic languages, a considerable number of languages have voiced stops which require more energetic efforts to produce sustained vocal fold vibration. Such languages include well-known ones such as French and Thai, as well as more obscure ones such as Ilwana. In languages of this type, the target in the production of voiced stops must be defined as including the presence of actual vocal fold vibration through the articulatory

closure period. Figure 3.1 shows the word budda 'pelican' from Ilwana. This word contains an initial voiced stop and an intervocalic geminate voiced stop which are both produced with full vocal fold vibration. This occurs despite the fact that these are both positions in which sustaining voicing requires particular additional effort, as has been shown by Westbury and Keating (1986).

In some of the languages in which sustained vocal fold vibration is part of the target for voiced stops, the downward movement of the larynx and the other cavity-enlarging movements used are sufficient to actually rarefy the air in the oropharynx. On the release of the oral closure, some inward airflow occurs. That is, there is a continuum between fully voiced stops and implosives. We will discuss this latter type of stop more fully below; here we merely want to note that implosives and fully voiced stops are not the same thing.

Thai /บ/ is often described as having a tendency to implosiveness. This may be a historical survival from its originally being 'pre-glottalised', which is is acoustically very similar to being implosive, as the corresponding Cambodian letter/sound is (was?).

[Rikker]

Yeah, I never noticed the implosiveness in the Thai บ until I took a course in linguistic field methods where we worked with a speaker of colloquial Phnom Penh Khmer. His /b/ and /d/ were very imploded, so we say that Khmer still is. The Thai บ, if imploded, is much less apparent than the Khmer, and the ด perhaps even less so.

But Khmer and Thai are not genetically related languages, rather they are very similar syntactically from centuries (or millennia) or close contact, and through lots of interborrowing (and with both borrowing heavily from Pali/Sanskrit).

[Silurian]

I think I am finally getting a little better at it. I was in a car the other day with three Thai and I asked them how to make the ป and บ sounds. I got three different answers and then they started arguing amongst themselves.

Then they tried to say two words that sound the same except for the first character being ป or บ. Of course, they could tell the difference but it sounded the same to me. Oh well, I will keep on trying. They said that I will be able to tell when the words are used in a sentence than just trying to pick it out with single words.

[Richard W]

But Khmer and Thai are not genetically related languages, rather they are very similar syntactically from centuries (or millennia) or close contact, and through lots of interborrowing (and with both borrowing heavily from Pali/Sanskrit).

There's also an element of phonological similarity. For example, the Khmer rule of vowel governance (a.k.a. rightward register spreading) has its counterpart in the 'irregular tone rule' whereby /a/ or /am/ separating two consonants may be ignored for the purpose of applying the tone rules. This looks like an areal feature - it also affected Cham, an Austronesian language.

Actually Tai may have been even more Khmer-like long ago - Ostapirat reconstructs 'Proto-Kra' *l-p@n as a precusor of Gelao pan 'tooth; dream', cognate with Thai ฟัน and ฝํน. The 'tooth' word then fits quite nicely with Proto-Austronesian *lipen 'tooth'. However, the Gelao languages seem to be nearly extinct, and so the evidence may not be so robust - it comes from the 'Duoluo' 'dialect', one of 4 dialects (or languages) of a 'language' with 3,000 speakers.

[meadish_sweetball]

I think I am finally getting a little better at it. I was in a car the other day with three Thai and I asked them how to make the ป and บ sounds. I got three different answers and then they started arguing amongst themselves.

Then they tried to say two words that sound the same except for the first character being ป or บ. Of course, they could tell the difference but it sounded the same to me. Oh well, I will keep on trying. They said that I will be able to tell when the words are used in a sentence than just trying to pick it out with single words.

It's all in the lip pressure. When you make a bor your lips start lax against each other, but when you make a bpor your lips should be tense. The whole sound is more 'decisive'.

Tense up your lips, press them against each other, fill your cheeks with air and then "pop" the seal of the lips audibly. Then do the same thing without filling your cheeks with air.

Or, easier, say "spy", but make a conscious, short break between the "s" and the "p" sound. Do this a few times and notice the position and tension of your articulators (most importantly the lips). Try to feel the difference of the "p" in s-py compared to the initial sound of "pie" and "buy".

[steveromagnino]

I've tried the spy vs. pie and to be honest, I feel like the py and pie bits are exactly the same....

Perhaps that is a regional english accent from southern hemisphere anyway, I reccomment Meadish Swedeball's advice to focus on lip pressure.

BTW the EXACT same approach works for ด dor and ต dtor . For Dor ด it is tongue back on roof of mouth curled back just touching moderate air pressure. For Dtor ต it is tongue directly behind front top teeth and the then pushed up against roof of mouth, increased air pressure.

It is easiest to think about it in terms of how to form your mouth, because otherwise we get into this debate about words sounding different when regional accents may mean that they don't.

Has anyone for instance ever tried to transliterate แ - for my version of english it sounds EXACTLY like air, hair, mare, but for an American it sounds nothing like any of those....

As I said, I am part Thai and I can hardly hear the difference unless they are next to eachother; however I know which words use which sounds and how to make that sound which means I usually get it right when speaking (unless I have forgotten which one occurs where!).

[meadish_sweetball]

The 'break' method I recommended above is sketchy in that you may be tempted to treat 's' and 'py' as completely separate units... if you do this, then 'py' will sound exactly like 'pie'. If, however, you are hel_l-bent on pronouncing the two component parts exactly like you do when saying 'spy' in your everyday speech, the puff of air after 'p' should disappear - I havent heard a local or personal accent of English where it does not (but phonetics are tricky of course, we often hear the sound we expect instead of the actual one spoken).

I spent 5 months in NZ, and as far as I could make out, your 'spy' does not differ from the RP English 'spy' as far as the 'p' sound being unaspirated (takes no puff of air) goes.

You can easily check this by seeing if your native accent 'pie' sounds like Thai 'pai' (go) or like 'phai' (cards) (sorry, no Thai keyboard here). If it sounds like 'pai', then I guess you are right and the method would be useless for Kiwis. If not, my guess is you are making too long a break in 's-py'.

[phibunmike]

I think I am finally getting a little better at it. I was in a car the other day with three Thai and I asked them how to make the ป and บ sounds. I got three different answers and then they started arguing amongst themselves.

Then they tried to say two words that sound the same except for the first character being ป or บ. Of course, they could tell the difference but it sounded the same to me. Oh well, I will keep on trying. They said that I will be able to tell when the words are used in a sentence than just trying to pick it out with single words.

It's all in the lip pressure. When you make a bor your lips start lax against each other, but when you make a bpor your lips should be tense. The whole sound is more 'decisive'.

Tense up your lips, press them against each other, fill your cheeks with air and then "pop" the seal of the lips audibly. Then do the same thing without filling your cheeks with air.

Or, easier, say "spy", but make a conscious, short break between the "s" and the "p" sound. Do this a few times and notice the position and tension of your articulators (most importantly the lips). Try to feel the difference of the "p" in s-py compared to the initial sound of "pie" and "buy".

So a little like the difference between a Spanish (Castillano) "b" and "v", where the "v" is like a "b" but less explosive ?

[Rikker]

I thought the Spanish "v" was actually a bilabial fricative, as opposed to a labiodental fricative, like our English "v". Anyone know for sure?