Are the Japanese し and the Mandarin "xi" really both [ɕ]? I've had this question for several months now, and haven't been able to find a satisfactory answer online. The Japanese and the Mandarin "xi", as in , are listed equivalently as [[ɕ] in the IPA]( However, my girlfriend and I can fairly clearly tell the difference between these two sounds, even after trying to isolate the consonant in the above words. (She is a native Japanese speaker learning Mandarin, and I am the opposite.) Are we imagining things, or is there actually a slight difference in [ɕ] between languages? If the latter, are they marked as identical in the IPA because no single language differentiates between the Mandarin [ɕ] and the Japanese [ɕ]?

As with all IPA transcriptions, for a consonant to be regarded as the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant ɕ, it only needs to fulfil certain conditions (which are listed under the 'Features' section in that Wikipedia link). This does not mean that the set of conditions reduce to a unique phoneme; it is highly possible that the variety of actual sounds fulfilled by the transcription ɕ can be differentiated by someone with more sensitive hearing abilities. The following is a comparison between Mandarin **xī** and Japanese **** :

* xī
*



As a native speaker of Mandarin, I cannot tell the difference between the consonants, but if you **can** tell the difference, I suspect that you may hear subtle differences in the pronunciation of ɕ in the other language audio examples in that Wikipedia link.