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Saying “Duh, Dis, or Dat” and not “The, this, or that”

charlessteezy
Hello, newbie here. English is my second language and I have been speaking english nearly my whole life but anyway lately I have been struggling a lot with my Th- words like “This or that”. In the middle of conversations instead of pronouncing it properly my brain would automatically shifts to saying “Dis or Dat”. Whenever I do try to correct myself in between I would start sounding gibberish as if I’m struggling to speak english. When I’m reading I do just fine so I only have this issue when I’m speaking to people. Sometimes I would try to use only “Duh,dis, dat” and avoid correcting my mistakes in between but I really don’t like it because it makes me sound less articulate. I wanted to see if any of you has had similar issues and how did you overcome it and also how long did it take you to overcome this ?

12 comments

Tetracheilostoma•
practice saying "th" to improve your muscle memory. do it with the unvoiced version ("thhhin") and the voiced version ("thhhis").
hella_cious•
Good news is that every native speaker understands you and many of them speak the same way. Do tongue twisters with the “th” sound
zebostoneleigh•
Practice practice practice. At some point, your default will switch to the correct pronunciations, but only if you practice and build the muscle memory for it.
Nameless_American•
Lucky for you, you can practice and get better at these two sounds slowly over time and do so without stressing, because there’s a lot of approximations which work. You will be understood. Remember, a lot of English speakers are used to the specifics of different kinds of accents.
Jaives•
that only means that the TH sounds don't exist in your language so you have to actively change the way you speak. so like everyone said, it all boils down to practice. practice until it becomes second nature.
Curious-Following952•
If you can blur the lines between the “th” and the “d” sounds it sounds pretty similar. As a native speaker, I don’t really notice if people do this or don’t. It’s a big characteristic of AAVE( African American Vernacular English) due to the Caribbean influence and is a mostly accepted pronunciation unless you’re in a lawyers office or something very formal.
cman334•
If you want to avoid going it you just have to deliberately practice till it stops. Important for me to point out that there are a few natural dialects that do pronounce some T sounds as D. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been, “corrected” by Europeans for the way I say Italy when discussing traveling.
Constant-Ad8869•
Just keep practicing that sound in your own time, the good news is your version with 'dis and dat' is still easily understandable to a native speaker and it's a very common thing to hear amongst people learning English. A lot of native English speaking children go through the same phase for example, don't worry!
ElephantNo3640•
Practice is the only way. Literally say those words over and over and over until you’ve made the pronunciation you want second nature. FWIW, my mother always pronounced those words that way, and she was a pretty well respected professional. Nobody ever questioned her articulateness because someone who only speaks one language is immediately and fundamentally one or more rungs lower in the linguistic acumen department than someone who casually demonstrates bilingual or trilingual ability. The folks here who want to get rid of their native accents strike me as similarly misguided.
Colin-Jennings•
I'm Irish and half the people in Ireland don't pronounce the th sound correctly. "Dis, Dat, Dese and Doe-es" rather than "This, That, These and Those"
carl_armz•
Put the tip of your tongue between your teeth and vocalize.
SinfullySinatra•
If it makes you feel better, it’s not an uncommon errors to make and some dialects don’t use th ever