English “Sh” vs. Japanese “Sh”
This is another thing that surprised me on my travels around Wikipedia. Apparently Japanese “sh” is not identical to English as I have always thought. Also Korean is placed with Japanese rather than with English.
English — ʃ — Sheep — Voiceless palato-alveolar fricative Japanese/Korean — ɕ — 塩 (shio) — Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative
Note the only difference between the 2 linguistic classifications is the order of palatal / alveolar.
I’ve listened to some of the samples on Wikipedia and I still can’t get my head around the difference. One of my native friends says that the Japanese “sh” is in between English “sink” and English “sheep”.
I’ll look for better explanations or examples but if anyone’s got some I’d love to hear about them.
