IPA reference · consonant
t͡ɕ — voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate
A soft, forward affricate released into /ɕ/.
How to make the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate
Blade of the tongue flat against the palate, tip behind the lower teeth, released into the soft hiss of /ɕ/.
This sound does not occur in standard English. That means there is no word you can say to find it by accident; you have to build it from the articulatory instruction above and check it against a recording.
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 t͡ɕ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
The hard counterpart.
What this means for learners
Mandarin q is this sound, which is why *qi* is nothing like English "kee" or "chee".
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 t͡ɕ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol t͡ɕ make?
t͡ɕ is the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate. A soft, forward affricate released into /ɕ/. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce t͡ɕ?
Blade of the tongue flat against the palate, tip behind the lower teeth, released into the soft hiss of /ɕ/.
Which languages have the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate?
Among the languages covered here: Polish (ćma, “moth”); Chinese (七, “seven”); Japanese (ちち, “father”).
What is the difference between t͡ɕ and tʂ?
The hard counterpart.