IPA reference · consonant
t͡s — voiceless alveolar affricate
A /t/ released directly into an /s/, as a single unit.
Also called: ts sound
How to make the voiceless alveolar affricate
Say the end of "cats" and treat it as one sound. The trick for English speakers is producing it at the start of a word.
English reference points: cats, pizza. 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 t͡s, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Learners drop the stop onset word-initially.
What this means for learners
German z, Italian z, Polish c, Romanian ț and Russian ц are all this sound — the spelling varies wildly across languages.
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 t͡s attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol t͡s make?
t͡s is the voiceless alveolar affricate. A /t/ released directly into an /s/, as a single unit. In English you can hear it in: cats, pizza.
How do you pronounce t͡s?
Say the end of "cats" and treat it as one sound. The trick for English speakers is producing it at the start of a word.
Which languages have the voiceless alveolar affricate?
Among the languages covered here: German (Zeit, “time”); Russian (цветок, “flower”); Romanian (țară, “country”).
What is the difference between t͡s and s?
Learners drop the stop onset word-initially.