P and B pronunciation: how to tell them apart

Practise one P line now

Open the P and B exercise

The exercise opens on one line from Ivan Joseph’s talk at 4:37: “Anybody go shopping and put on a pair of pants this week?” Four words in it have a P: shopping, put, pair and pants. Listen to it, record your version, then open Compare and play your take beside the original.

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What Sada can and cannot tell you

Sada checks which of your words came across and how your timing compares with the speaker. It does not grade individual sounds. When a mistake makes another word (pair → bear, pan → ban), that word may show as missed. When no other word exists, as with “pencil” said with a B, the recogniser usually guesses the right word from context, so a matched word does not prove your P was right.

Judge the sound by ear: play your take next to the speaker. To hear one word on its own, use a dictionary with audio such as Cambridge’s pronunciation dictionary; for sound-by-sound grading you need a teacher or a tool that scores individual sounds.

How to make P and B

Both sounds are made with the lips: close them, then open them in one go. They differ in voice and in a puff of air, and the puff depends on where the P sits in the word:

• Voice: B is voiced, like the Arabic ب: your vocal folds vibrate. P is voiceless. Put your fingers on your throat and say “ba”, then “pa”: you feel the buzz only in the first.
• The puff of air: when P starts a stressed syllable, as in “pair”, “put” and “pencil”, a small puff of air comes out with it. Hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth and say “pair”: the paper moves. Say “bear”: it hardly moves.
• After S: in “space” and “spend”, English P has no puff at all, so don’t drill one there. Keeping the voice off is enough, which makes “space” one of the easiest places to get P right.
• In the middle and at the end: in “opening” and “shopping” the puff is weaker, and at the end of a word it may disappear, but the voice stays off. The vowel before a final B is longer than before a final P: compare “cab” with “cap”.

Minimal pairs: when P or B changes the word

Say each pair aloud, P first. These are the places where Sada may catch a mistake, because the mistake makes a different word:

Five real lines, from short to long

Each line opens in Sada at its place in the talk. Start with the first, and move on only when you can say it whole without looking at the caption:

“Anybody go shopping and put on a pair of pants this week?”

Ivan Joseph · 4:37 · P in “shopping, put, pair, pants”; B in “anybody” · Practise this line →

“He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder.”

Elizabeth Gilbert · 13:14 · P at the start and in the middle of words: “piece, paper, pencil, tape” · Practise this line →

“But, practice, practice, practice, and do not accept failure.”

Ivan Joseph · 4:14 · B in “but”, then P three times in “practice”, and once in “accept” · Practise this line →

“I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening,”

Daniel Levitin · 1:17 · P and B in one line: “piece, cardboard, taped, up, opening” · Practise this line →

“So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up.”

Amy Cuddy · 4:08 · a longer line: B in “big, basically”, P in “up, space, opening” · Practise this line →

Common mistakes of Arabic speakers

• B for P: “pencil” comes out as “bencil”, and a brand like Pepsi, written in Arabic with ب, is said with a B. The fix is the paper test at the start of the word, then the whole line.
• Overcorrecting: after practising P, some learners turn real B sounds into P, so “big” becomes “pig”. Line 5 has “big” and “basically”: keep the buzz in both.
• P next to B: when the two sit close together, as in “cardboard” and “taped it up” in line 4, the mouth tends to make them the same. Slow the line down until you hear the difference, then say it at the speaker’s pace.
• A puff after S: don’t add a strong puff in “space”; English doesn’t put one there.

How to practise

1. Open an exercise from this guide. Hold a sheet of paper in front of your lips and say “pa” until the paper moves; then put your fingers on your throat and say “ba” until you feel the buzz.
2. Say the pairs aloud, P first: pair, bear; pan, ban; pull, bull. Keep the puff on P and the buzz on B.
3. Play line 1, then say it after the speaker in Repeat mode, slowly, with a puff on “put”, “pair” and “pants”.
4. Record a take, then open Compare and play your recording and the original. Review words and timing; Sada does not grade individual sounds.
5. Move down the lines from short to long, and go back to any line where a word with P was missed.

Keep going

The other guides in this series, all written for Arabic speakers: TH sound practice: “think” and “this”, -ed endings pronunciation: t, d or id, V and F pronunciation, Word stress practice, Question intonation: rising and falling and Sentence stress: content and function words. All of these problems in order of how much each affects being understood, with one line for each and a short self-check: English pronunciation for Arabic speakers. For more lines to practise, from famous talks: Ivan Joseph: The Skill of Self Confidence; Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement; Carol Dweck: The Power of Believing That You Can Improve. To see what Sada checks in every take, read the pronunciation checker. For a wider plan, with word stress and -ed endings: how to improve your English pronunciation. For more real sentences from short to long: listen-and-repeat practice.

Sources: word pronunciations from the Cambridge Dictionary; the puff of air on P and its absence after S from Aspirated consonant; Standard Arabic having no /p/ from Arabic phonology.