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ɸ

voiceless bilabial fricativeJapanese ふ fu — blow across the lips, no teeth involved (not English f).

fricativebilabialvoiceless

Hear it

Synthesised in your browser from this sound's own recipe — formants for vowels, filtered noise for fricatives, a burst for plosives. A robot mouth, not a recording: what you hear is the physics the symbol describes.

In combination

Sounds change colour depending on their neighbours — coarticulation is why isolated drilling only gets you so far.

ɸa
ɸi
ɸu
aɸa
iɸi

Build longer chains in the combination lab.

How each language writes it

LanguageSpellingsExampleNote

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