IPA reference · consonant
h — voiceless glottal fricative
Turbulent airflow at the vocal folds with no constriction anywhere in the mouth.
How to make the voiceless glottal fricative
Simply breathe out with the mouth in the shape of the following vowel. There is no articulation above the larynx.
English reference points: hat, ahead. 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 h, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Learners substitute /h/ for the much stronger velar friction of German, Russian and Greek.
What this means for learners
French, Italian and Russian have no /h/ phoneme, which is why speakers of those languages drop it in English — and why English speakers over-produce it where it should be silent, as in French *homme*.
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 h attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol h make?
h is the voiceless glottal fricative. Turbulent airflow at the vocal folds with no constriction anywhere in the mouth. In English you can hear it in: hat, ahead.
How do you pronounce h?
Simply breathe out with the mouth in the shape of the following vowel. There is no articulation above the larynx.
Which languages have the voiceless glottal fricative?
Among the languages covered here: German (Haus, “house”); Japanese (はな, “flower”).
What is the difference between h and x?
Learners substitute /h/ for the much stronger velar friction of German, Russian and Greek.