IPA reference · consonant
b — voiced bilabial plosive
A /p/ with the vocal folds vibrating through the closure.
Also called: voiced bilabial stop, b sound
How to make the voiced bilabial plosive
Close the lips and voice through the closure — you should feel a hum in the throat before the release, not only after it.
English reference points: bin, cab. If you speak English natively you already produce this sound — the work is recognising it and placing it where the target language wants it.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for b, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Spanish softens /b/ to /β/ between vowels; learners keep the hard stop.
What this means for learners
German and Russian devoice word-final /b/ to /p/, so *ab* and *Hund* end voiceless despite the spelling.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of b attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol b make?
b is the voiced bilabial plosive. A /p/ with the vocal folds vibrating through the closure. In English you can hear it in: bin, cab.
How do you pronounce b?
Close the lips and voice through the closure — you should feel a hum in the throat before the release, not only after it.
Which languages have the voiced bilabial plosive?
Among the languages covered here: German (Buch, “book”); Italian (bene, “well”).
What is the difference between b and β?
Spanish softens /b/ to /β/ between vowels; learners keep the hard stop.