Do the words "version" and "virgin" have the same pronunciation?

As others have said, in general ChatGPT is very bad at things related to pronunciation, even though it's correct in this case. The sounds /ʒ/ and /d͡ʒ/ may sound the same to you due to your language background. May I ask what your native language is?

A native speaker can easily distinguish the two words, and It'd most likely be amusing to refer to an iteration of software as a "virgin" or confusing to refer to olive oil as "version". Where are you hearing the two words to compare them?

Yes, it's a different consonant sound.

I'm a native speaker from London; I also teach pronunciation. The phonetic difference between version and virgin is the same difference between 'Persia' and 'gin'.

Yes, they sound different. We are used to distinguishing those phonemes. Most of the time, we don't even think of /ʒ/ /dʒ/ and /ʃ/ /tʃ/ pairs as being that similar.

not a native speaker, but those two sounds are easily distinguishable.

A method that I used to differentiate pronunciation. I go to google translate and type the first word followed by period(.) then the second word. Click on sound and it will pronounce both words which ease the difference.

To give you a sense of the spectrum used in English, (at least, as I hear/speak it,) which is not well-reflected by the letters used: Please: s = hard Z (voiced s) Pleasure: s = soft Z, soft J (voiced sh) Version: s = soft Z, soft J (voiced sh) Virgin: g = hard J, soft G (voiced ch) Joy: j = hard J, soft G (voiced ch) Go: g = hard G (voiced k) So, yes, English natives absolutely can hear the difference between version and virgin. If anything, I would say that it's easier to hear the s/g difference than the ion/in difference. However, if these sounds aren't different in your native language, it's completely normal to struggle with telling them apart. Your brain learned early on that the difference didn't matter, so it pruned the connections that enabled you to hear them. It's likely to take quite a bit of time and effort to undo that process. Some people find it doesn't happen at all, and you just have to figure out what the words are from context clues.

If the IPA is different, then it’s pronounced differently. Ask chatGPT if you don’t believe me. /s

No, they are not pronounced the same. And please stop using ChatGPT. "Virgin" is pronounced like "ver-jinn". "Version" is pronounced like "ver-zhun."

In my accent, the ending sounds are identical and the only difference is between the consonants represented by “s” and “g”.

Not at all

It depends on your accent. "Version" can also be /ˈvɜː.ʃən/ But yes, they're usually different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxeAiBF61I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative

I'm mainly asking because I want to understand how /ʒ/ and /dʒ/ are different at the **phonemic** and **articulatory** levels. I’ve read that one is a fricative and one is an affricate, but in real speech, they seem so close that I can’t tell them apart at all. I'm already 24, and I no longer have the kind of auditory sensitivity babies have when they first acquire language. If two sounds don't contrast in my native phonemic system, no matter how many times I hear them, I might still struggle to hear the difference. I’ve actually experienced something similar from the other side. A few years ago, when I was teaching a Brazilian friend my native language, I pronounced the same word twice (or so I thought), but she told me they sounded different. I was confused at the time, but now I understand — some distinctions are simply not present in our first language, so we don’t naturally notice them. Thank you for insights!

They do not have the same pronunciation.

Shuh versus zjuh, sort of thing.

ChatGPT is correct in this instance, but it's a terrible idea to use it as a language learning resource.