My enemy, the /th/
Fear comes creeping into my mind as my soccer team forms a circle during warm-up to begin team stretching. For our stretching program, everybody does the same stretch while we one by one count out loud to ten in a counterclockwise direction. While everybody else focuses on doing the stretch correctly, the one thing I can think about is how I don’t want to have to be the one to yell out the number three. Five is fine, eight is alright, I’ll even be ok with my least favorite number six. But three I don’t want, for the simple reason that I cannot for the life of me pronounce /th/.
My teammate on the other side of our 34-girl-strong circle begins. “One,” she says, and so the counting begins. At this point, counting ahead to see which number I’ll be while also focusing on the stretch is impossible for me. I’m too stressed to figure it out so I reluctantly decide to leave it up to fate. The first time around the circle, the odds are in my favor. My number is five. For a moment I’m relieved, but I remind myself that it is not over yet. We do a total of 10 exercises, meaning that I will likely have to yell out two more numbers today.
So, the process begins again. Attempting to predict which number I will be. Giving up and leaving it to fate. Again, fate (or maybe just simple mathematics) prevents me from embarrassing myself. “Nine” is my next number and I gladly say it out loud.
A moment later, a realization hits me. Going from number five in the first round to number nine in the second means that I always skip six numbers. So, the dreaded scenario after all does come true once it is my turn again.
Left with no other choice, I yell “Free!” What a nightmare.
Feeling embarrassed by mispronouncing /th/ is a daily occurrence for me. Living in the US, I use words with /th/ in every conversation but almost every single time I end up pronouncing /th/ as an f or a t.
The process of exchanging /th/ for the easier version of f, t, and sometimes v is generally known as th-fronting. In the entire world, there is only a handful of languages that include th-sounds, most likely because it is a difficult sound for people to pronounce. Those growing up with /th/ tend to learn how to pronounce it in their childhood years but those learning English as a foreign language have to actively practice pronouncing it.
English is not my mother tongue. I grew up speaking German and only began learning English as a foreign language at the age of 10. The German language doesn’t use the letter combination /th/. In the beginning, my teachers attempted to teach us children how to pronounce it, but they never put enough of a focus on it that I would have learned how to say it correctly.
I didn’t realize that I was mispronouncing one of English’s most often-used letter combinations until I was told by a professor in my sophomore year of college in the US. While working on a project together, he suddenly remarked that in the two years he had known me, he had never realized that I am unable to pronounce /th/. He didn’t know that neither had I.
Even though this presents only a minor problem in the grand scheme of life, at that time it felt like a punch in the gut. Had I really been running around mispronouncing English words without realizing it for eleven years? Because of my realization, I suddenly felt self-conscious and a bit inadequate.
I thought about all of the people I’ve met and talked to in English over the last few years. I wondered if people generally noticed and whether they gave as much as a second thought about my problem. For reasons I cannot explain anymore today, at the time I especially worried how mispronouncing /th/ would go in my future career as a journalist. I thought about having to talk to hundreds of people in my career and all of them possibly not taking me seriously because of how unprofessional I sounded.
Most of all, the realization mentally catapulted me back to my childhood, when I had to attend German speech therapy lessons because I tended to pronounce the letter s with a lisp. Over several years, I was taught how to say it correctly, earning a pretty sticker as a reward from my teacher for every lesson I completed. In speech therapy, learning to not lisp meant learning to not touch my tongue to my teeth when I pronounced an /s/. I did successfully lose the lisp, but I seem to have lost it to an extent where I was unable to relearn the part of it that was needed for the English /th/.
When first learning English, I remember feeling uncomfortable during the few times my teacher wanted us to practice pronouncing /th/. For years, I had been told that pronouncing s with a lisp was incorrect which made me think of it as being somewhat embarrassing. Because of that, I couldn’t imagine that there actually was a language in which a lisp wasn’t embarrassing.
In recent years, I have not perceived it that way anymore, but at this point, I have spoken English for so long that mispronouncing the /th/ is a hard habit to break. When practicing pronouncing it correctly, I now face the issue of not knowing how to produce the sound at all. I also don’t really hear the difference between the way that native speakers say it and the way that I say it.
Because of all of that, I have given up on trying to pronounce it correctly. Today, I don’t see the issue as strongly as I did upon first learning /th/ and upon my first realization that I can’t pronounce it one and a half years ago. Even though I’m still hyper-aware of mispronouncing words with /th/, I mostly make fun of my issue now, especially because it leads to some hilarious moments. Words like thriller, Thor, and three are only some of the words my friends have to decipher on a day-to-day basis.
Mostly, I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t notice or simply don’t care that I pronounce things (quite literally) incorrectly. There is usually enough context for people to know what I’m talking about and if not, they will just ask if I can repeat what I said.
So what if I announce “free” instead of the number or ironically the number “four” instead of the superhero?! Having a problem articulating certain sounds in another language should not be seen as an embarrassment. Acquiring a foreign language is hard work and one can be proud of being able to speak it fluently, even if it is not perfect. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much whether others hear my difficulty with /th/ as long as they can understand what I’m trying to tell them.
My resolution for the next practice: I will not attempt to predict which number I’ll have to say out loud. I will not let anxiety take a hold of my brain. Instead, I will make sure to extra proudly announce “free” when it is my turn to count out loud. Take that, /th/!