See the difference
We use "fill" and "feel" here because they're a clean pair in our recordings. The tongue is what to watch. For "feel" it sits high, close to the roof of your mouth, and glides up a little more at the end. For "fill" it sits a little lower, relaxed, and stays still.
Try it
- Smile slightly and say "see". Notice how high the front of your tongue is, and the small glide up at the end, like a quick y.
- Say it again, but let your jaw and tongue relax a little, as if you had stopped trying, and keep the tongue from gliding up. The sound drops toward "ih".
- Say "eat, it, eat, it". Let "eat" glide up at the end. Keep "it" relaxed and still.
- Try it in words: "seat, sit", "heat, hit", "reach, rich". The word with no glide should sound almost lazy.
If it helps at first, exaggerate the glide in "eat", then take it away for "it". Don't rely on making one word longer and the other shorter. How long a vowel lasts changes with the sound after it, and what keeps these two words apart is the tongue and the glide.
Pairs to practice
- sheep
- liveleave
- bitbeat
Does practice work?
It does, though vowels are harder than th. Thomson (2012) trained 26 Mandarin speakers for eight short sessions, and they improved and kept the gain a month later. Wang and Munro (2004) trained 16 Mandarin and Cantonese speakers over two months, and the gain held for three months. Both trained the ear on many voices. On the other hand, a study of 70 Chinese graduates found this vowel didn't improve with audio-visual or teacher-led training. The tongue is hidden on this sound, so looking at a mouth doesn't tell you much. That is what the side view is for.
What to do next
Reading how a sound is made helps, but a page can't tell you whether your own tongue got there. In Language Boss, every sound you say in a scene is scored after the call, and you're told what it came out as. X-ray Mouth draws the tongue and lips over your own cheek while you say a phrase to the camera, so you can see what to change. X-ray Mouth is free.
Questions
Isn't this just a long vowel and a short vowel?
Not mainly. Textbooks often call them long and short, and many learners hear only the length at first. But how long a vowel lasts also depends on the sounds around it. What keeps "ship" and "sheep" apart is the tongue and the glide, so aim for the relaxed tongue with no glide, even when the word has to be said fast.
Why do I say sheep when I mean ship?
Mandarin has one high front vowel, close to the one in "sheep". So when a word has the vowel in "ship", your mouth uses the nearest vowel it already knows.
