To think i don't have a speech impediment

[McColonel]

To me, F and TH are pronounced exactly the same. E.g. three and free - I say them in exactly the same way.

My wife says I can't pronounce th, and I always pronounce an F when it should be TH.

Does anyone agree with me, that they are pronounced the same? Or is she right, and I can't speak properly? My brother agrees with me.

Jessie - of course Scottish people have connected speech patterns. They don't say words individually in isolation like a dalek

Lol iguana is corrected. Ask anyone who has studied phonetics. Its a perfectly normal thing, perhaps less in some accents than others. I wouldn't say all of them either (welsh accent) but to a degree we al do it.

I'm now wondering if my inability odd way of saying "train" is linked to my Scottish roots. My cousins (Scottish) all say the word "medium" "meejum".

I certainly don't say t-rain. Its more like chrain. Whereas I DO say tube and not choob as English people tend to.

I'm a bit

My son has high frequency hearing loss and cant here these sounds well - you might be the same?

Yes you are wrong. Very very wrong. The speech police, sorry ve speech police, will come and get you.

I'm from London, and while it's common to hear f and th used interchangeably (in the same way that people drop the t at the end of a word like 'cat') children are certainly taught the 'th' sound in school (and all the sounds in cat) otherwise spelling would be a challenge.

I am pretty sure that now that phonics is universal all children are supposed to be aware of the difference between th an f even if this isn't always reflected when they speak.

iguana the particular phenomenon to which I was referring was that of adding "r"s between vowels. I am perfectly capable of saying "Jessica Ennis" but Gary Lineker, it seems, is not able to do so without adding an R between the names.

I am sure of course that I link other sets of words with phantom extra letters or sounds and barely know that I am doing it. The point I was making is that the types of words people connect and how and why they connect them vary from accent to accent.

In other languages, French for example, the way that words are joined to aid pronounciation may well be a grammatical rule eg pronouncing the 't' in prêt à porter but not in "il est prêt" and so is uniform across all accents.

Oh I see. Yes, your point is correct. Rhotic accents do not have an intrusive R. However Gary Lineker is capable of saying Jessica Ennis without the R in between. It's just that he doesn't because of his accent. Scottish people have a gap between the two words because they insert a tiny glottal stop to separate them, that's all.