Voiced and Unvoiced Consonants
A pretty useful thing to know depending on your case but i'll still explain what that is anyway through my typical magical ways with words.
Let's do something weird-ish! (If not, just jump down to the part where I start explaining)
Lightly put a finger on your vocal cords. Start to make a ssss sound.
You should really feel nothing. Then turn that sss into a zzz midway.
Whöa! Did you feel that? The buzzzzing? Well congrats, you just voiced a consonant.
But what does it all mean?
Basically in a nutshell, voicing is simply the act of applying vibration to your vocal cords on consonants to sort of change it's sound.
Vowels also makes your vocal cords vibrate because... they're vowels, you sort of can't unvoice them hence why the term is specific to consonants.
Of course you can probably figure the voiced version of sh or f with this trick. But then, how can you figure out t and p and th?
Well, you sort of can but not easily as it's sort of hard to voice stops without knowing the positioning. Luckily, you were born into pronouncing the voiced form these sounds already. I'll give you the English list of these guys:
VL: ch / tch V: j / dge (Both pairs by the slashes are exactly the same in pronunciation.)
VL: th (THunder) V: th (/ð/) (oTHer) (I should of said this earlier but when I represent sounds of the IPA I put them in two slashes as English doesn't really have some ways to represent certain voiced or voiceless sounds.)
Of course there are some more technically in English as I just showed the essentials and way more if you count every sound that can be possibly made in the world. Infact, pretty much any consonant has it's 2 forms, every one but a few.
Yay cool, but where's the use?
Well, aside from me not having to repeat myself, there are cases where you'll go learn a language and that they might use these terms; most likely for the sake of convenience. But I have another application.
Let's say you're trying to learn Japanese Hiragana or something as you see this:
Oh man! You really don't want to learn each individual character right?
Why learn ta and da when you could learn it as ta but with a "voicing mark" (technically the dakuten in this case.) it's da.
Of course in Japanese this doesn't for every single charcater because a dakuten or a handakuten aren't voicing marks as they are simply a dakuten or a handakuten. Most of the time they switch the sound to it's proper voiced form but there will be exceptions.
B is not the voiced version of H/F. They're not even related by how they're pronounced. B is a stop and H and F are fricatives. Same idea for H/F to P. Also, the voiced form of Sh is not J as it's Zh as the voiced form of Ch is not D as it's J.
But despite the bumps, it's a pretty neat way to look at and learn the characters faster.
And that's pretty much voicing and stuff.
