If English wasn’t your first language, maybe if you learned English later in life, were there any words that you had a really hard time learning how to pronounce? Do you think that had to do with the sounds made in your first language?
Colonel.
Less of how hard it is to actually pronounce, more like how hard it is to believe it’s pronounced that way.
Just wait till you try “Lieutenant” in Britain or Canada.
Worcestershire
Kernel
Ask a German to pronounce “squirrel.”
The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce “Eichhörnchen.”
Eye-ch-urn-ken?
Irish and we have that gutteral Ch sound in Irish so I feel like it’s a cheat code for us.
None of those ch’s are guttural and you skipped an h;)
Or a French person.
This one’s actually funny to me. It’s a bit of a meme that francophones struggle with squirrel and anglophones struggle with écureuil, but I personally had no trouble with it. You just have to hear it once.
My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that’s very impressive if true. It doesn’t help that in my accent, it’s pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I’ve heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.
Or a person
Is it tricky? English is my first language and it doesn’t seem difficult to me, but I never gave it much thought. So fascinating.
It only has a single vowel, which is an r-coloured vowel…which most languages don’t have. For that matter, many languages don’t even have our “r” sound, so colouring a vowel with “r” is incredibly hard when you don’t even have that consonant to colour with!
Not to mention that after using that r-coloured vowel, you have a semi-syllabic L immediately afterwards. (Is squirrel one syllable or two? Depends on who you ask I guess!). As you may know, L and R are the same in some languages. And even if a language has both AND pronounces them the same ways as English (not necessarily common), they might not allow an L to follow an R! (Just like how we don’t allow R to follow an L)
Oh, and which vowel are we colouring? “i” or the “short I”. This is a very rare vowel, following a third dimension (tenseness) that the majority of other vowels don’t use. Not common in other languages, either!
So that’s the last two sounds.
The first three is a consonant cluster containing another uncommon consonant (w). And even ignoring that, s and k can’t always be combined together in other languages.
So literally every sound in the word “squirrel” has something foreign and rare about it to many languages immediately as you start to get past that “s” sound. Brutal.
It’s not the trickiest, but it’s not exactly easy to say it like the native speakers.
What’s the problem with Skouirrelle? :^)
When I was younger it was any word where an R is followed by an L. Girl, world, twirl… im better at them now tho
I know a kid who can’t say these either but I didn’t put together what it was before.
Worcestershire sauce
English as my first language and I can’t get that one right either.
No one can.
Wuh ster shuh. I live in that county, it’s definitely over-hyped.
Oh, one really pronounces the ‘shuh’ part? I was told it’s just the first two syllables.
Just the first two syllables would be Worcester, which is also a place.
You don’t say the last ‘R’? I’ve always said it ‘woo - stur - sure’ or ‘wi - stur - sure,’ depending on how fast I say it.
I’m American though.
That’s because you’re American. That’s how you say it with an American accent. Like think about how Brits say “sure” vs how Americans say “sure”. Americans pronounce the R far more.
Americans are harder on their R’s where they’re written, but Brits take the R’s out and put them softly in other places where they aren’t written (to the American ear)
odd, I never had an issue with WarChester sauce.
It helps to break it up.
worce - ster - shire
“Worcestershire sauce is the worst.”
“Thousand island is worster.”
“‘Worster’? Sure.”
“The”. The “th” in “the” is the only sound in English I can think of that doesn’t have a very similar counterpart in Dutch. The closest you could get using just Dutch phonemes would be “zuh” or “duh”.
Of course, we have two th sounds just to make things more fun
But dutch people area native English speakers
When I was first learning as a kid, I used to pronounce three as tree. I actually got picked on a lot because of it, because middle schoolers are assholes
Pilots say tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
The th sound is honestly a bit difficult. Three will end up sounding like either tree or free, but not three. Usually I just pronounce it as a slightly weird T. I have quite a Dutch accent anyways and that just something y’all will have to deal with ;p
Learn to speak English with an Irish accent (like Lenin) and no one will bat an eye at you saying tree.
Two people scored the same after the first five. They were the… sixths.
It’s a near miss of biting my tongue every time.
sixths-sevenths?
It’s a common one my brother! The F sound in free is made where your top teeth are on your bottom lips, and tongue is retracted. The th sound is when your tongue is resting on or just behind your top teeth, almost like you’re smiling.
Also to add, a lot of native speaking adults also struggle with the th sounding words, generally due to local accents.
The number of native English speakers who can’t pronounce “specific” and instead say “pacific” is too damn high.
“sp” cluster can be hard. So can “sk” at the end of a word. Hence why you can get “axe” instead of “ask”
Corollary. Not only I can’t say it out loud, I can’t even form it properly with my inner voice.
English is my first language and I still mess up “pluralism” from time to time.
It’s the names Korra and Larry put together.
Facade as Fack-aid, is one.
*façade
In France certainly.
Some English speakers pronounce that the french way
Niche is another weird one bc in some contexts it is pronouched the french way in others, “nitch”.
The squirrel’s ecological “nitch”.
Finding your niche in the job market…
I’ve never heard anyone of any native language pronounce it fack-aid? The English speakers I hear always say fuh-saad. Or are you saying that fack-aid is how you pronounce it and you struggle with fuh-saad?
Don’t feel bad, everyone. English pronunciation IS difficult, though through tough thorough thought, you can do it!
I have to perform a context switch between “v” and “w” sounds, so words and phrases that contain both (e.g: “very well”) sometimes end up with only “w” sounds. (My native language does not have a regular “W” sound)
But even after 20 years speaking it, English pronunciation is complete nonsense. Most of the time, you just need to memorize the words. Because trying to figure out how to say something, you also need to know if the word is borrowed from any other languages that use Latin alphabet, and then pronouce it pretending to speak that language. Simplest example: Mocha (moh-ka) and matcha (maht-cha). But there are countless borrowed words that don’t change spelling in English.
I once watched a German YouTuber talk about learning English and how quickly she improved when she started working in an English office because she _ had_ to. In the video she says one of the things she’s always had difficulty with but is now much better at and almost never slips up on now is vs and ws. Then, immediately afterwards in the next sentence she goes “now in this wideo…”
Ignominious anthropomorphic pauciloquy.
I think many, many native speakers would struggle with those too so if you’re at that level you’re doing really well. Congrats!
There are words I really
hatestruggle with…
Whirl, macabre, dairy, faux, chique.So mostly
you hateFrench :)They just need to write what the heck they meant to say. :D
Queue, schedule, vehicle - struggles of my life lol
Queue is just the name of the letter “Q”.
But it “kyoo” might not be an easy sound depending on your mother tongue
I feel its more like “kyuu”, or have I been mispronouncing it all the time?
Kyuu is perfect!
“uu” would just be “oo” (most likely) in English, generally. I’m not sure what the difference would be
Schedule (sk- or sh-) differs between countries/regions. So you’re good either way.
