/f/ · labiodental fricative Mandarin has f, but Spanish f needs the upper teeth to actually contact the lower lip with sustained friction. Many speakers produce the Mandarin f with light contact, close to h — which in Spanish reads as a different sound. Spanish f is also always f: no ph, no gh spellings.
Four steps to /f/
Confirm the gesture, then learn where it changes, then put it in words.
Make sure the teeth really touch
Upper teeth lightly press the inner lower lip and you blow. If it is just «rounded lips blowing», that is h. Check in a mirror: an f should leave a faint mark on the lower lip.
Make the friction long
Word-initial f in Spanish is often longer than the Mandarin one, especially when stressed. The f of foto or fuego sustains for around 100 ms rather than a brief brush.
No aspiration
The Mandarin f sometimes carries a puff. Spanish f is a pure fricative — no jet of air between teeth and lip. Hold a hand in front: fin should not register.
Hold it in medial and final position
Spanish f also appears medially (café, sofá) and in loans finally. The medial one weakens most easily, because both neighbours are vowels.
Spelling: f is almost always written f
Spanish has no ph spelling (a few old spellings aside): one letter, one sound.
Word-initial and word-medial: always [f], never silent.
Modern Spanish always writes f. ph survives only in very old books.
Which one are you
The three most common readings.
My f sounds like h
No lip-teeth contact. In Mandarin many speakers produce a laryngeal fricative, but Spanish contrasts f and h (fino and hino are different words).
f is too short, like a puff
Word-initial f sustains longer. Deliberately stretch it to 0.1 s, then speed back up.
I cannot separate b and v
In Spanish b and v are the same sound (bilabial voiced). Nothing to do with f.
Word list
14 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-initial7
Word-medial7
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 | /f/ 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 f, 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.
Every f on this page is word-initial or medial. The page reports duration only, not spectral centre of gravity: f's energy sits low (around 1–2 kHz), overlapping with x (1.5–2.5 kHz), so a spectral criterion here would mislead.
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.