/m/ · bilabial nasal Spanish m is the same sound as the Mandarin initial in «mā», so producing it is not the problem. Two things are: it changes place (the n of un poco is pronounced m), and Mandarin has no word-final m, so closing a word on a nasal is unfamiliar.
Four steps to /m/
Confirm the gesture, then learn where it changes, then put it in words.
Confirm it is the sound you already have
Lips closed, vocal folds vibrating, air out through the nose — identical to the Mandarin initial in «mā». Nothing new to learn here. Pinch your nose lightly: an m will buzz clearly.
Watch it «become» m
Spanish n turns into m before p / b / m: un poco sounds like um poco, un beso like um beso, conmigo like commigo. The spelling stays, the sound changes — one of the most regular sandhi rules in Spanish.
Close on a final m, do not add a vowel
Few Spanish words end in m (mostly loans: álbum, régimen), but when one does, close the lips and stop — do not release into a vowel. Mandarin has no final m, so a vowel tends to appear by itself.
Put it in a coda
Far more common is m inside a word at the end of a syllable: campo, tiempo, importante. The lips must genuinely close, otherwise the following p sounds detached.
Spelling: m is stable — the trouble is n written, m spoken
m is only ever written m. What actually trips people up is the n.
Word-initial and word-medial: one-to-one, no exceptions.
Still written n, pronounced [m]. The rule is obligatory, not a feature of fast speech.
Mostly loanwords. Close both lips and stop — do not release a vowel.
Which one are you
The three most common readings.
My final m comes out as «muh»
Expected: Mandarin has no final nasals, so a weak vowel appears on release. Practise «close - pause - speak», leaving half a second of silence.
I say un poco with an n
It is written n and pronounced m. This is not an optional linking habit but the standard realisation — an n there actually sounds off.
I cannot tell m from n
The difference is not nasality (both have it) but the lips: m closes them, n puts the tongue tip on the ridge. Feel your mouth: for m the lips are shut.
Word list
16 words grouped by where the sound sits in the word. Click a word to hear it. These are recorded as separate words, not cut out of the sentences above — a word cut from a sentence carries its neighbours' transitions and always sounds muddier. All three groups use the same speaker, so what changes between them is position, not voice.
Word-initial8
Word-medial8
Corpus and acoustic measurements
Click any word in a sentence to play from that word. The pale band over the waveform marks the measured boundary of the target word.
Per-token data
Every number below is measured directly from the audio, not hand-annotated.
| Token | Accent | Sex | Target | Target word | /m/ duration | F0 | Pitch range | HNR |
|---|
Where these numbers come from
12 synthetic sentences from two Peninsular voices; phoneme boundaries from MMS_FA.
Corpus: 12 Spanish sentences whose target words contain m, with the target word never sentence-initial or sentence-final (those positions are distorted by pauses and sentence stress).
Boundaries: MMS_FA forced alignment; word and phoneme boundaries come from the same pass. The target phoneme is looked up in the word as declared by the page, never taken blindly from the onset.
Target duration: the column is the length of the target phoneme itself, not the whole word. The «target word» column is the word.
The m here comes from the target word's onset or medial position in 12 sentences. The duration is that of the closed-lip portion — nasals carry continuous low-frequency energy with no burst, so the boundaries come from the aligner rather than from an energy jump.
What this page does not do: no paired differences (there is no pair to compare), and no verdict on whether you pronounce it correctly — the durations describe native speech, not a scoring standard.