In the comments of the last post, the commenter Davenport made a bunch of objections to my description of the Korean sounds, only some of which were valid. For some reason, he decided to challenge my knowledge of the sounds of Russian and English, both of which I already know. On the advice of Brujitohistoria, XxemoviolencexX, and satsuchan2, two out of three of whom voted to ban, I decided to ban him for one month to flatten the curve of his inability to listen to reason.
However, I cannot entirely blame him since the fault lies not just with his uncritical interpretation of Wikipedia for information about various languages’ phonologies, but with Wikipedia itself, the articles on which can mislead many more than just him. Just look at the article for “voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative”. Now, everyone can hear that the sound on the page is Russian щ, the same as the “sh” in “short”. And yet, the tongue position pictured would be completely wrong for Russian щ (where the position of the tongue is above the top of the front teeth; this is to constrict the air passageway and make the “sh” sound more high-pitched), but correct for Mandarin x as in 小 (a hissing noise of the type snakes and geese make, and where the air passageway is deliberately expanded). Now, anyone with a brain can understand these are not the same sound. Let’s go on to the “voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate”. The sound on the page is clearly Russian ч, no different whatsoever from the English “ch” (supposed to be the voiceless postalveolar affricate). And yet this is supposed to be the same sound as the Mandarin j as in 近. Only a moron could possibly think the clear, crisp, extremely high-pitched “j” (in fact more or less equivalent to Russian дьж) in this video is identical to Russian ч. Needless to say, the supposed IPA equivalents for Korean aren’t right, either (it’s the double consonants with the exception of double s which have Mandarin equivalents, the plain consonants do not).
What this experience makes clear is that there is no alternative when learning the phonologies of different languages to actually hearing the sounds for yourselves (including, but never limited to Google Translate), and, if necessary, reading the occasional academic paper on the subject and making analogies with other languages. Relying on claimed IPA equivalents on Wikipedia will get you nowhere.
Don't trust Wikipedia
Are you familiar with Lazy Glossophiliac? He is a native Russian speaker who's been self-learning Mandarin for some years now and seems fairly advanced.
His Twitter is: https://twitter.com/Glossophiliac75
His blog is: https://lazyglossophiliac.blogspot.com
I wonder what his thoughts would be regarding the IPA sounds and comparison between Russian and Mandarin.
Always found it suspicious that Mandarin seemingly doesn't have voiced consonants - but you can hear them in speech. Faint, sure, but there
It's the fault of IPA system, though. Too much effort to differentiate 200 different variants of "ch."