IPA reference · consonant
s — voiceless alveolar fricative
A narrow channel at the alveolar ridge produces high-frequency friction.
How to make the voiceless alveolar fricative
Tongue tip near but not touching the ridge, sides sealed, air forced down a groove in the middle of the tongue.
English reference points: sun, pass. 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 s, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Polish, Mandarin and Russian each have three-way sibilant contrasts where English has two.
Polish ś and Mandarin x are neither /s/ nor /ʃ/.
What this means for learners
Hungarian spells this sz and uses s for /ʃ/ — the exact reverse of Polish, which trips up learners of both.
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 s attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol s make?
s is the voiceless alveolar fricative. A narrow channel at the alveolar ridge produces high-frequency friction. In English you can hear it in: sun, pass.
How do you pronounce s?
Tongue tip near but not touching the ridge, sides sealed, air forced down a groove in the middle of the tongue.
Which languages have the voiceless alveolar fricative?
Among the languages covered here: Polish (sala, “hall”); Japanese (さくら, “cherry blossom”).
What is the difference between s and ʃ?
Polish, Mandarin and Russian each have three-way sibilant contrasts where English has two.