/ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are paired consonants. /ʃ/ is voiceless and /ʒ/ is voiced. The sides of the tongue touch the insides of the teeth on the sides of the mouth. Lips are rounded – like that – and the sound is made when air is forced through the small gap between the teeth and the tongue. /ʃ/ is the sound that means, “be quiet.” /ʒ/ is quite uncommon in English and it’s actually only used when we’ve borrowed words from other languages, but we’ll talk more about that later. So, let’s take a look at some words with /ʃ/. So we’ll start here, word initial position: she, sheep, shook, shy, sure. Notice that there’s no H there, but it still is a /ʃ/ sound. Now we’ll look at some medial words: mission, nation, ocean, fishing, machine. And finally, some where we hear this sound at the end of the word, in word-final position: dish, rush, cash, wish, and hush. So now let’s take a look at some words with /ʒ/. As I said, there aren’t very many; these are words that we have borrowed into English. So, let’s take a look. As I’m doing this, you can spend some time thinking (and) asking yourself, “Where do these words come from? How did they get into English? What, what language did they come from?” There’s no prize if you have the right answer, but you can feel proud of yourself! All right, we’ll start with when the sound is in word-initial position: Jacques, genre. Now we’ll take a look word medial: leisure, usual, fusion, casual, precision. And then finally here, in word-final position: rouge, garage, beige, prestige, barrage. Can you guess where these words come from? Well, they either come to us from French, or from Latin, through French. So, there aren’t actually any minimal pairs that I could find, so instead of minimal pairs, we’re going to look at a different letter that – or a different sound, rather – that people often have trouble with. So you notice that here, I’ve changed that to red and that’s to highlight the fact that these words, or these sounds, rather, are actually different from the /ʒ/ sound that we were looking at earlier. Alright, so as before, I’m either going to say a word from this list or a word from this list. You listen carefully and you try to tell which one, and at the end I will show you which one that I said. Let’s begin: she, seat, shock, shave, bash, dosh, mosh, shale, sought, scene. Okay, so here are the answers. The words that just got darker are the words that I said. So, how did you do? If you’d like some more practice look below.