English as a second language learners: what words were really hard for you to pronounce?
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.
You can find "leftenant" as a normal spelling in older texts. No one is sure why.
right?
Worcestershire
omg "rcester" words are so hard
Kernel
It was spelled with an R in the past, and they tried to change it to an L (because that's how it "properly" should be according to its origins), but only the spelling stuck, probably due to everyone being illiterate anyway.
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;)
So.... eye-ch-churn-chen?
First bit like Ike (edit: or Reich)
The ch digraph in both instances of Eichhörnchen is pronounced closer to the way you pronounce the first consonant in the word "hue". It's closer to the front of the mouth than the one you're thinking of in Irish. It's ç in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's a different sound than the other way that ch is pronounced in German and has to do with what sounds/letters appear around it. The other pronunciation of ch in German is normally pronounced as x (this sound is the one you're thinking of that's in Irish) or χ.
That's really clear, thanks. I learned a lot, including learning that I should not try to pronounce Eichhörnchen. :)
he last is more -chun
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
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)
It helps to break it up.
worce - ster - shire
"Worcestershire sauce is the worst."
"Thousand island is worster."
"'Worster'? Sure."
I say it wuss tuh sure
odd, I never had an issue with WarChester sauce.
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.
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"
Little kid me would agree about the difficulty with the "sp" cluster. "Spoon" came out as "psoon".
Suh-poon is also reasonably common!
It if you speak Spanish, "Es-poon"!
"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
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.
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
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
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?
Also to add, a lot of native speaking adults also struggle with the th sounding words, generally due to local accents.
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.
I wouldn't say struggle, but I did wonder for a while how to pronounce "anemone".
Everyone has trouble with that one. There's even a joke about it in Finding Nemo. I don't imagine most English-speakers can spell it offhand.
I was listening to a best-selling author's recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you're in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?
That sounds like a universal truth if I ever heard one.
I'm having a whole cognitive dissonance moment because I could've sworn it was "anenome". I even studied this in college and have an ecology degree. Likely over the last twenty years I convinced myself that the common incorrect pronunciation is correct, but I immediately looked it up and then tried to rationalize that it was some sort of mandala effect. The simplest answer is that it's confabulation on my part, and I'm wrong.
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.
English is my first language but saying "edited it" drives me crazy.
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.
As a math teacher, I hate "sixth" or "sixths."
so hard to say omg
ME TOO omg
For most new native English speakers, it's Spaghetti (pisketty) and Elephant (efalent). For my son it was Caterpillar (calapitter). I struggled with pronouncing Uncomfortable. I wanted to say every syllable.
You would be accurate if you pronounced every syllable of the word uncomfortable. Americans are just lazy, not pronouncing every syllable. Nobody would look at you strangely if you pronounced every syllable of that word. It would just seem like you're emphasizing HOW UNCOMFORTABLE you are if you pronounce every syllable of the word :-)
No, I mean that as a kid, I wanted to say every syllable, but I found it difficult. I could hear adults saying it the easy way, but I wanted to know the real word. I loved to read as a kid, and soaked up every word I could find.
calapitter aww
I know, my wife would melt every time he said it.
Corollary. Not only I can't say it out loud, I can't even form it properly with my inner voice.
It's the names Korra and Larry put together.
Rural and squirrel
Oh god yes
German?
I always thought it was amusing that both German and English have equally difficult words for those fuzzy little rodents. "Squirrel" and "eichhörnchen."
Skwrl - no vowels
Sk-wirrel is how it usually breaks down in my head
Rural juror.
https://www.songlyrics.com/30-rock/season-1-the-rural-juror-lyrics/
30 Rock had some of the best wordplay I've ever seen in any show.
yeah, that and like Arrested Development 😂
Facade as Fack-aid, is one.
*façade
In France certainly.
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?
Most loan-words are hard for ESL learners, they retain the original language pronunciation and break many phonetic rules of English pronunciation.
Oh so you're saying the latter.
Fuh-saad is pretty in line with English pronunciation "rules" (though English doesn't really have pronunciation rules the same way other languages do—see though, through, cough, bough, etc). Maybe a more "English" way of saying it would be fuh-sayd, but I think the c would be interpreted as a soft c even if it weren't a loanword. Again, hard to say with English which is notoriously inconsistent though.
Same here.
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....
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?
"uu" would just be "oo" (most likely) in English, generally. I'm not sure what the difference would be
Kyuu is perfect!
Schedule (sk- or sh-) differs between countries/regions. So you're good either way.
I personally am having a hard time with "overwhelmingly"
I always pronounced “only” as “on-lie”. I heard other people say “only” and couldn’t understand what they meant.
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…”
AGREED about English pronunciation, I don't think anybody truly understands
Genuine. I still wonder if I pronounced it correctly every time I use the word.
It either rhymes with "nine" or with "fin" depending on the phase of the moon.
"Subtle". I can not pronounce it in a way that it sounds different to "saddle".
Native. I say suttle. It's a dirty word from the spelling in fairness.
Subtle is spelled weird, but rhymes with muddle. Do you also pronounce "mad" and "mud" the same way? With my accent they have the same first vowel sounds as saddle and subtle
Pretty sure subtle rhymes with shuttle.
Sure, but shuttle also rhymes with muddle in my East coast US accent, at least in normal conversation. I can force myself to slow down and really enunciate the T, but even then the difference is easy to miss.
According to the Macmillan they are [ˈsʌt(ə)l] vs [ˈsæd(ə)l], so the vowel changes slightly, but it depends on the speaker; I'm not native but I say saddle with a more open "a". But they're otherwise almost identical to me (in the British pronunciation included in the dictionary I hear a "t" both times, in the American one a "d" both times - which is how I say it too)
Does it sound like "bat" when you say "butt"?
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".
texts, clothes. consonant clusters.
Words starting with th- (th-fronting) and plurals ending in -ths, -sps, etc.
Caveat
It gets easier if you understand that it's a latin word, not english
I struggled with that as a native english speaker at first
But now I realize the correct pronunciation sounds super cool
"Three" and "thread". Not because of the th, that's never been a problem (I learnt the basics very early in life when pronunciation was easy to learn), but because my mouth somehow wouldn't go from "th" to "r". It was only a few years ago when it suddenly clicked. Weirdly, I never had an issue saying "through" and "threat".
[the]
Routing (e.g. for cables or traces on a pcb). I've heard both over the years: as in cangaroo or the german Frau. But the latter might be a german mis pronounciation.
Which brings up two new questions. Is it German or german and mispronounciation or mis pronounciation or mis-pronounciation?
Mispronunciation. "Mis" isn't a word, but a prefix (or something) that gets attached to another word to modify it. Since it's not its own word, it gets prepended to the root word ("pronounce" in this case) without a dash.
German would always have the capital. In English, proper nouns get capitalized. There's an official list, I'd bet, but a good rule of thumb is that titles (books, movies), specific place names (Germany, London, Abbey Road), people's names (Bob, Reiner), and "I" (but not "me" etc) are put into "Title Case". (Title case wouldn't be capitalized, I just typed it that way to demonstrate it)
I actually like a lot of the German capitalization rules. On the internet, a lot of people will be more casual with capitalization. Some people will capitalize "important words", or things that aren't proper nouns but have a different meaning than usual...but these kinds of things are improper.
As for routing (and router, and heck...route in general)...both are correct pronunciations of this "ou". I think "au" is more common for networking in North America, and "oo" is more common in other English-speaking countries (the UK, Australia...).
As for "route" as in "Route 56", I tend to hear and say both/either (I'm in North America).
Sorry it's so inconsistent!
Very precise answer. Thanks, I've learned something.
My apologies though, I got it backwards. I'll edit the comment to be accurate, but for router (networking stuff)...
"oo" is more common outside of North America.
"au" is more common in North America.
Roo-ter is usually British and former colonies. Row-ter is north America.
'Anthropomorphous' is still like a tongue twsiter for me
I mean as a first language speaker, it is.
Sheet / Sheep / Shit / Ship
knowing how to spell definitely, and pronouncing drawer.
For others, in my accent drawer rhymes with door and or. All spelled differently to get the same sound. None of the three are spelled phonetically by the 'rules' of English. They should be drore, dore, and ore.
Incidentally, ore is a word. But you're right.
Definitely's spelling is easier if you recognize that the root word is finite. De-finite-ly.
It's not finate. That's not a word (unless it's some bullshit word no one ever uses).
My friend has a hard time pronouncing 'teeth'. Just comes out sounding like 'tits'
I'd suggest "choppers" but it would probably come out "knockers."
"sorry". I mainly use English in my daily life and at work for several years now, but cannot make it not sound like "sowy" or roll "r" too much.
Entrepreneur
Idea. Still not sure if I rponounce the "ea" correctly...
eye-dee-uh
It was I, Dia.
Absolutely.
For some reason I always trip up when saying "I appreciate it"
I feel like a lot of people just drop the "I a" and say "'preciate it!", lol
(That's assuming you're using it like "thank you", and aren't just starting a sentence)
Everything was hard. Even now I can't speak or pronounce every word. The reason: in my country learning english means learning how to write right, speaking is not important. So yeah, you have to teach yourself by speaking with others, if you find other people who really want to improve how to pronounce right. Even now I feel chills when I remember how my english teacher pronounced Switzerland.
"Lapel" was an interesting find. That and "development" really hammered in the importance of accentuation. I'm still unsure of what I want to do with "schedule". "Burger" sometimes sounds off when I say it.
Schedule depends on where you'd like to blend into. You've got:
Possibly more! I think the ones with two syllables sound most common/least specific to a dialect. SK is more American and SH is more UK.
Throughout
There are words I've only ever seen in writing and have no fucking clue how to pronounce.
Sometimes my partner and I disagree about the pronunciation of a word, only to eventually look it up and both be wrong.
I've heard "rug" is weird for many Europeans
congratulations
None of them, English is an amazing language. I pronounce stuff like a bro.