Download
← All posts

Fan or Han? The Two Friction Sounds English Learners Keep Swapping

Say fan and han out loud. If they came out almost identical, you're not mishearing — you're merging two sounds that live in completely different places in the mouth: /f/ and /h/.

One friction happens at your lips. The other happens in your throat.

/f/ is a labiodental fricative: the top teeth rest lightly on the bottom lip, and air is forced through that narrow gap. The friction is produced right there, at the front of the mouth — you can see it in a mirror and feel the airstream against the back of your hand.

/h/ is a glottal fricative: the lips, tongue, and teeth do nothing at all. The mouth simply takes the shape of whatever vowel comes next, and the friction happens deep in the throat, at the glottis. It's essentially an audible exhale with zero lip involvement.

Same rough "breathy" impression, completely different location

Try these pairs in front of a mirror. On the /f/ words, your top teeth should visibly touch your bottom lip. On the /h/ words, your lips shouldn't move at all — the sound should come from an open throat pushing air straight into the vowel. If your lips look the same for both lists, you're producing two different phonemes with the exact same gesture, and that's the whole problem in one sentence.

Why this particular pair gets merged

Plenty of languages either lack /f/ entirely or don't treat /f/ and /h/ as strictly separate categories the way English does. Some borrow foreign /f/-words using an /h/-based sound because their own sound inventory has no labiodental fricative to reach for — Japanese loanwords are a well-known example, where "coffee" becomes something closer to kohii. Other languages have regional varieties where /f/ and /h/ historically split from the same consonant and never fully separated in casual speech. If your ear grew up treating these as close cousins rather than strangers, your mouth never had a reason to build two distinct movements for them — and it still doesn't, until you deliberately practice the difference.

How to fix it: check the gesture before you trust your ear

Don't start by trying to "hear" the difference more carefully — start by checking whether your mouth is doing two different things. Say an /f/-word and confirm your teeth touch your lip. Say an /h/-word and confirm your lips stay completely still while the sound comes from your throat. Drill pairs like fair/hair and fill/hill back to back, keeping everything about the vowel identical and changing only the opening gesture. Once the movement is reliably different, your ear recalibrates around it — not the other way round.

Not sure whether a word needs the lip-friction /f/ or the throat-friction /h/? PHONO reads any English text through your camera and marks every word with IPA, with both US and UK audio to check yourself against.
Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/phono-english-phonetics-ipa/id6783243417 · phono.douhouse.com