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
omg “rcester” words are so hard
Ask a German to pronounce “squirrel.”
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? :^)
Ends up as “skwiwwl” for me every time…
Worcestershire sauce
odd, I never had an issue with WarChester sauce.
Don’t feel bad, everyone. English pronunciation IS difficult, though through tough thorough thought, you can do it!
You must say this out loud as an affirmation.
“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
I never knew there was a difference, whoops
Rural and squirrel
English is my first language but saying “edited it” drives me crazy.
As a math teacher, I hate “sixth” or “sixths.”
so hard to say omg
Same goes for ’ pocketed it’
And my first language is Dutch, but like to speak English
Agree! I seem to add an extra “dedede” in there.
ME TOO omg
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.
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!
The two first are pronounceable, the third not so much, for me at least 😅
I can pronounce it but I don’t think you have too much to worry about pal…I’ve come across that specific word about three times in my whole life.
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
Most of these are French loans
I’m coming from a phonetic language… Anything else don’t make sense. Tho I have not studied Chinese or Arabic so those should be interesting.
I always pronounced “only” as “on-lie”. I heard other people say “only” and couldn’t understand what they meant.
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
Genuine. I still wonder if I pronounced it correctly every time I use the word.
I think I was just pronouncing everything wrong for the first several years I was speaking English because I learnt English from books and never heard most words out loud. But I don’t remember anything being physically difficult to pronounce in terms of emulating how it’s said when I first hear it pronounced “correctly”.
