Fricative consonants practice
The following are items for practicing fricative and affricate (blend) consonants, namely, the sounds /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/.
1 Tongue twisters
- Sally sells seashells by the seashore. So if Sally sells seashells by the seashore, where are the seashells that Sally sells?
- I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish, but if you wish the wish the witch wishes, I won’t wish the wish you wish to wish.
- Ah shucks, six stick shifts stuck shut!
- The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.
- She sells cshs by the C shore.
- I think she should sit.
And a sort of a tongue twister poem with some deliberately ungrammatical and made-up words:
Moses supposes his toeses are roses,
but Moses supposes erroneously.
For Moses, he knowses his toeses aren't roses,
as Moses supposes his toeses to be.
2 Short narratives
The following are some short narratives that I wrote for practicing fricative and affricate (blend) consonants, namely, the sounds /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/.
In the zoo at night, silence fell as the zoo visitors left. Crickets chirped as church bells rang out from an adjacent district. In the cages, crocs guarded their eggs as ducks lapsed into slumber. The elks cringed as already satisfied tigers nearby loudly belched. The asps blitzed about their dens, while hedgehogs rummaged for grubs, and black bats emerged from the warmth of their crypts. A lynx triumphed over its prey and plopped it down before its mates, as wolves glimpsed at the skunks kept safe from them by a chain link cage, and loathed the four-legged morsels that they could not grasp.
Out by the oaks, ants who had waltzed amongst each other in the daytime relaxed for the night, as did ant lions that had delved into the sands. Spiders in their orbs wrapped their desiccated bugs and other victims that they had bagged in spider silk, like limbs set in casts. Under the light of the street lamps, various insects made their attempts at acts of courtship, but the less lucky dating applicants were jinxed by the heat of the light bulbs.
- Programmer’s lingo: csh = "c-shell," a type of command-line environment
- Note: toeses is not a real word, but a children’s term for ‘toes’; the rhyme is from Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly in the film Singing in the Rain.