/tʃ/ · voiceless affricate (ch) Spanish ch is an affricate: the tip fully blocks the ridge (stop), then releases into friction (fricative) as one sound. The Mandarin ch is also an affricate but aspirated; Spanish tʃ is not. The other common error is voicing it into dʒ (English j) — Spanish ch is plainly voiceless.
Four steps to /tʃ/
Confirm the gesture, then learn where it changes, then put it in words.
Stop first, then release into friction
Tip presses the ridge (as for t), then opens a narrow slit and air frictions through. It must be one sound, not t followed by ʃ.
Do not aspirate
The Mandarin ch carries a puff; Spanish tʃ does not. Hold a hand in front: chico should not register. This is the clearest marker for Mandarin speakers.
Do not voice it
English j (judge) is voiced dʒ; Spanish tʃ is voiceless. coche is not «ko-je». The vocal folds do not vibrate during tʃ.
It is shorter than a plain fricative
An affricate only has friction in its second half, so it is shorter than s or f. Compare the durations here with the s page — that is how you check whether you are splitting it into two sounds.
Spelling: only ch, two letters but one sound
Spanish ch is a fixed digraph — it is never read as two letters.
Word-initial or word-medial, ch is always [tʃ], one sound.
In coche the first c is [k] and only ch is [tʃ]. The contrast is audible in the table on this page.
Which one are you
The three most common readings.
It comes out aspirated, like Mandarin ch
The Mandarin ch is aspirated. Spanish tʃ is not — almost no puff on release.
It comes out as English j (voiced)
Voiced. Feel your throat while saying tʃ: it should not vibrate.
It comes out as t plus ʃ
Not fused. Practise «block — slowly release» with no pause, so friction follows the burst immediately.
Word list
10 words grouped by where the sound sits in the word. Click a word to hear it. These are recorded as separate words, not cut out of the sentences above — a word cut from a sentence carries its neighbours' transitions and always sounds muddier. All three groups use the same speaker, so what changes between them is position, not voice.
Word-initial2
Word-medial8
Corpus and acoustic measurements
Click any word in a sentence to play from that word. The pale band over the waveform marks the measured boundary of the target word.
Per-token data
Every number below is measured directly from the audio, not hand-annotated.
| Token | Accent | Sex | Target | Target word | /tʃ/ duration | F0 | Pitch range | HNR |
|---|
Where these numbers come from
12 synthetic sentences from two Peninsular voices; phoneme boundaries from MMS_FA.
Corpus: 12 Spanish sentences whose target words contain tʃ, with the target word never sentence-initial or sentence-final (those positions are distorted by pauses and sentence stress).
Boundaries: MMS_FA forced alignment; word and phoneme boundaries come from the same pass. The target phoneme is looked up in the word as declared by the page, never taken blindly from the onset.
Target duration: the column is the length of the target phoneme itself, not the whole word. The «target word» column is the word.
All 12 target words contain tʃ in onset (chico) or medial position (leche). ★ Affricates are harder to align than plain sounds: they contain a stop and a fricative, and the aligner may place the boundary at the burst or at the end of friction, 20–30 ms apart. The value here is the whole segment (stop + friction), so it is naturally longer than the pure friction on the s page — the two are not directly comparable.
What this page does not do: no paired differences (there is no pair to compare), and no verdict on whether you pronounce it correctly — the durations describe native speech, not a scoring standard.