Today I came across an online collection of recorded exercises from W. Smalley’s Manual of Articulatory Phonetics. The exercises are design to help distinguish different types of sounds based on their point of articulation, articulators, manner of articulation, or point and manner of articulation. This looks useful if you have the book, and quite useful if you don’t.
Articulatory phonetics is a sub-field of phonetics which involves documenting how humans produce speech sounds. Specifically how our articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc), interact to create the specific sounds.
Just for the record, another classic is Peter Ladefoged’s Course in Phonetics, the sound files for which are also available on-line at http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/.
An Cainteoir Dóchais: x definitely doesn’t sound as it should.