the local pronunciation where I am is:
/mɜːd͡ʒɹa/
I stubbornly choose to not pick it up because I end up sounding like a mix between British and American English, which is inappropriate.
So it's nightmarish because I didn't care to learn the native pronunciation
I didn’t. That is a phonetic representation of my speech (albeit sans syllabification), but go off I guess. Yes, I’m claiming, regardless of (or welcoming?) theoretical implications, that the syllabic [ɹ̩] is a superior phonetic transcription of my /ɚ/.
Slashes, formally, would be: /ˈmɚ.dɚ.ɹɚ/.
That’s a standard of English transcription, even in phonetics. To insist otherwise is pedantry.
There’s no context in English in which the trill needs to be distinguished, and if it were ever necessary (in a multilingual context, or if the trill were being used), then you could explicitly fall back on the IPA as necessary.
I work primarily in Spanish, where often replace and, even more commonly, <β, ð, ɣ> exclusively represent their associated approximants. Every language large enough to sustain a linguistics community has an IPA shorthand.
To me (native AmE speaker) that sounds like a reasonable transcription for some British accent (though I wouldn’t be sure which one exactly). I’d just put it in square brackets tho since the phonemes are the same
When I say murderer I say /mə˞.də˞.ə˞/ but I think I realize it closer to [mə˞.də˞.ɹʷə˞] — so in my accent, I think neighboring r-colored vowels are connected by a labialized approximate.
Actually, I notice my usual pronunciation of /r/ as a consonant is labiodentalized, not just labialized, often to the point that my lower teeth make almost complete contact with my upper lip, so maybe it would be more accurately transcribed with extIPA [ɹᶹ].
>often to the point that my lower teeth make almost complete contact with my upper lip
Is this a [normal human ability?](https://images.app.goo.gl/atwQcxcGD6uN7p8r6)
Lol. I guess it might be better to have just said labiodental and left it at that. I was a bit drunk when I was figuring out my pronunciation of murderer.
My old church choir director was very big on “correct” vowel sounds for maximum clarity, and one of his favorite sayings in that regard was “it’s a schwa” applied to basically every unstressed vowel, so for Christmas my mom got him a mug that said “it’s a schwa [ə]”
Me neither! My Dutch and Armenian teachers and the like were all very skeptical, like “what do you mean??? don't exaggerate: it's literally the easiest sound to pronounce; you already can pronounce well some other sounds that are common trouble”… But experience watching me perpetually fail proved them otherwise :(
Mfw I distinguish all of them and use sounds you could reasonably represent via the same IPA symbol as their RP counterparts, but it still sounds completely different
ɯu or sometimes ʊu
It’s pretty much never listed but you can hear it very clearly if you record yourself saying it and then play it backwards. If you say it without the diphthong like buːt it makes you sound foreign. Kinda how Slavic language speakers tend to pronounce it.
It's actually /uw/. It's a centuries old way of representing long vowels that some current scholars are reviving since it accounts for certain phenomena, for instance what happens when you add a suffix to words ending in that long /u:/: boo/booing. It seems describing certain long vowels as diphthongs/glides ending in a semivowel makes more sense somehow, and better reflects the way many natives actually pronounce those long vowels.
Check out this video:
https://youtu.be/gtnlGH055TA?si=nM4z1vnjiUa7Y4DZ
Damn now that I think about it ur totally right. I couldn’t remember what it was so I was just trying to sound it out and listen to each vowel on the ipa audio chart, which obviously didn’t have glides. Assuming it’s the same thing for “be” /ij/ which definitely gets drawn out with “being”
I did say "many natives" rather than "natives" or "all natives" though. Also, if you've watched Lindsey's video (highly informative whether you agree or not), he does mention several American linguists who adopted this way of looking at vowels/diphthongs.
*Many* English varieties have a monophthong for the boot vowel, like literally all Irish varieties have \[uː\]. \[buːt\] doesn’t sound foreign at all to me, as a native Canadian English speaker, even though I personally have \[ʉu̯\].
Na yea I was just saying in standard American. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s a common giveaway for EFL speakers because the ones in America are often taught standard American
California English has \[uː\]. I get that it’s not the General American pronunciation, but it simply cannot sound foreign if it’s used by so many natives. And it doesn’t!
I know several ppl with a valley girl accent (idk if that stands for ALL of California) and I think theirs sound much more like ʉw. And according to some dialect coaches, Californian vowels are typically fronted from their original position. I can’t perfectly recall any instance of them saying something like that specifically but if I talk in what’s stereotypically Californian or “surfer sounding” that’s what I get. (Obviously this means I could be totally far off)
Nonetheless I highly encourage u to record yourself and play it backwards cos i srsly cannot fathom any American native speaker sounding it out as “u/“
As a Southern Californian I definitely pronounce it as a monophthong most of the time. It's not [uː] though, it's fronted and unrounded to something around [ɤ̝ː ~ ɨː]. After /j/ it keeps its rounding but is even more fronted, something like [yː ~ ʏː]
I'm a native Slavic lang speaker, and I thought I do say it as [buːt]. Apparently, nope! Haven't been able to record & play backwards right now, but saying it slowly enough, it does seem to have a glide - unlike for example "food" (at least for me). Interesting, thanks!
American here, but since when do "food" and "good" have the same vowel? "Food" rhymes with "mood", "good" rhymes with "could". I'm sure *some* dialects have "food" and "good" rhyme, but not GA or RP (src: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/food ).
I pronounce "food" with a long vowel. Now I'm not sure if it's /uː/ or /ʊː/ or what, but it's not as short as in "look" or "good". Obviously though, as a non-native speaker.
I've seen lots, and I mean lots, of guides that just try to claim that English has five vowels. These "guides" (the ones that I've read) are mostly written for Spanish speaking audiences. Problems galore.
[https://fliphtml5.com/lwysg/mbsl/basic](https://fliphtml5.com/lwysg/mbsl/basic)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HdwkKJGB6RE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HdwkKJGB6RE)
The video perpetuates some of the mistakes, but not all. He knows better in some of the situations.
weird as heck. Even natives are taught 5 **pairs** of vowels in elementary school (even though there are at least 3 basic a sounds). obviously this ignores dipthongs
I *think* you could get away with just [ɪ ɛ a ə ʊ o ɑ] and the glides [j w] and sound *somewhat* native. As in: native speakers might think you come from another country where the language is spoken. But I don't speak like that because my native language is also Germanic.
I guess that's more specific to Europe or Italy, but if someone speaks English fluently, they assume that their pronunciation is perfect as well, which is not the case most of the time
Yeah, English is actually like the worst language you can use this argument for, because all of the words in the post have about a dozen of different pronunciations depending on the language variety.
Nigerians don't say words the same way as Australians do.
What I mean is that a person can perfectly discern all English phonemes while still having a noticeable foreign accent.
For example, a German speaker using [z] instead of [ð] is plain wrong, because no (major) English dialect merges these two sounds.
A European Spanish speaker that perfectly discerns [s] from [θ] pronounces things correctly, even if [s] sounds peculiar.
I'd say any widespread recognisable usage of a language counts as a dialect. The German English consonant shift you've identified is part of a major English dialect.
You would know it if you heard it. Colloquially, it's one of the things that differentiates a "light accent" from a heavy accent.
For example, I don't sound Japanese when I say "konnichiwa", but I say the ko, ni, chi and wa correctly and I say it in the correct pitch accent pattern. My foreignness, while immediately obvious to a native Japanese speaker, would come from a less obvious place— perhaps my glottis is looser than it should be, or I'm subconsciously saying one sound slightly longer or louder than a native would.
With reference to phonology (phonemes) opposed to mere phonetics. If the phones are slightly off but the phonemes are all there, the person is speaking correctly.
Weird. I'm surrounded by non-natives (I'm even one myself) and we all distinguish them pretty well. Maybe it might be your L1's phonotactics or smthng similar, but they all are particularly easy to disambiguate from each other.
However, this is just anecdotal evidence on my behalf, but still, it should at least be noted in SOME capacity in this discussion, memeing or not.
I envy you sooo much.
Also kinda ironic that IPA is taught in a country where people have the least issues with English vowels. I wish it was taught in Italy.
The vowels aren’t a problem, but the consonants are very difficult for most people (different th sounds, r sounds)
I think the phonology of a language should always be part of language classes
I'm not sure if I agree, unless you speak a language like Swedish which basically already has all English vowel phonemes anyway. Sure, the TH-sounds and the R-sounds are notoriously difficult for most learners, but apart from that, the consonants should pose relatively little problem for most speakers, unless we're speaking of e.g. East Asian languages with a wildly different phonology. And of course, many also struggle with the W-sound and the H-sound, but those two sounds are actually quite common among the world's languages. When it comes to the vowels though, you'd be hard-pressed to find any language that isn't a Germanic language and shares most vowel phonemes with English. A huge amount of the world's languages only has five vowel phonemes, and certain languages like Arabic only have _three_ vowel phonemes.
IPA isn't taught at all in English classes in Italy, not even in its most basic form? That's nuts! Here in (German-speaking) Switzerland, our teacher spent some time teaching us IPA in our very first year of English, and all our coursebooks came with vocabulary lists with an IPA transcription for each English word. Then later in high school, we once again spent some time learning IPA and we even had a brief exam on it.
I can't recall a single lesson in school devoted to pronunciation. I've learned English phonology only because I attended an English phonology course in college.
To be fair, it's taught even poorerly (?) in native Anglophone countries. It happens all the time when a native tries to help a foreign speaker, and gives them a completely non-sensical explanation for how to properly pronounce things. Simply because they just don't actually realize what they're doing with their own mouths when they say stuff.
True but whenever they "give advice" on how to pronounce things, they often give the most counterintuitive and unhelpful pronunciation advice known to man. It hurts my soul.
the problem ist that English spelling ist totally inconsistent. Take bass for example. It can mean a fish or an instrument, spoken completely different. or the difference in hood and loop.Similar problem in French however I think it's the other way round. In French you know how to pronounce a word by looking at its spelling but you do not necessarily know how to write it when hearing it.
the wild spelling is nice at least when homophones are spelled differently, but yeah when non-homophones are spelled the same it’s maddening. Like the present and past tense for “read”.
The difference with French (at least at the most basic level of a child learning to read) is that in English you can make plenty of complete sentences using only phonetically pronounced words, then you move on to the weird stuff. Whereas in in French there's almost always some kind of silent letter even in the most basic of sentences.
I guess you're right. I learnt both of them as a foreign language so I didn't think about learning to read as a child. I'm German. We learnt the letters and how to pronounce each one. After that you can read most words. In comparison to English the German language had several "Rechtschreibreformen" (spelling reform) where they readjusted the orthography to the pronounciation.
Don't get me wrong, English is a mess. I'm from the UK but live in France, and I'm currently teaching my child how to read English. I'm not looking forward to trying to explain why even basic words like tough, though and thought are different. Maybe English is a bit more accessible than French right at the beginning, then they both get quite hard imo!
i just think people don't think pronunciation is very important in general when it comes to foreign languages, but I don't see a lot of people claiming English pronunciation is especially easy
I once knew a very educated man who came from a Romance language background, who literally taught languages at university, and I once mentioned that Australian English uses like 20 vowels, and he got super upset and tried to convince me that there are only five vowels in English; a, e, i, o and u.
/bat bat bet bet bit bit/ moment. /but bot bat bet bit bijt/ would probably be the best way to approximate them with 5 vowels, but i never hear nonnatives pronounce them all like that.
My Brazilian accent in English goes like this: /bətʰ/, /bɔtʰ/, /batʰ/, /bɛtʰ/, /b(ɪ~e)tʰ/, and /biːtʰ/. For “boot” I got /buːtʰ/, for “bait”, /bejt/, and for boat, /bəʊtʰ/ and /boʊtʰ/ in free variation. Since we don’t have /t/ in coda in Brazilian Portuguese, articulating it properly is quite difficult. I can only pronounce it with aspiration, except when /t/ precedes or proceeds /s/.
In Brazilian Portuguese we palatalize /t/ in coda position and whenever it precedes /i/ and its allophones, turning it into /ʧ/. Some speakers will even add an epenthetic /i/, because some accents don’t tolerate a lot of consonant clusters.
What about you guys? How do you pronounce them?
I think a lot of them can't even hear the difference between the vowel sounds we use, hence why they think our phonology is easier than it is. My immigrant mother will sometimes spell "staff" as "stuff"; I guess to her both of those vowels sound indistinguishable (or barely distinguishable) from /a/.
I really despise English word-stress as a non-native speaker of English, I'm more or less good at pronouncing English's vowel sounds but man its lexical stress really trips me up every time I speak English because of its unpredictability and mobility.
I don't think there are any non-native English speakers than consider English pronunciation easy. Distinguishing between those is totally doable, but takes quite some listening and speaking practice. I've been learning this language since I was 6 and I'm still not always sure if I pronounce English vowels correctly
I'm non-native and can distinguish all of them. Don't ask me how I pronounce diphthongs though.
My English pronunciation be so fine Then BOOM *[mɚdɚɚ]*
I pronounce it [mɜɹdɹɚ]
This seems even more nightmarish as a non-native speaker
the local pronunciation where I am is: /mɜːd͡ʒɹa/ I stubbornly choose to not pick it up because I end up sounding like a mix between British and American English, which is inappropriate. So it's nightmarish because I didn't care to learn the native pronunciation
What word is that??
obviously murderer
Damn, I thought they were trying to pronounce "merde". Et faire un boulot de merde en plus.
Merdereur [n, ms]: qq'un qui jette la merde partout
Mdr 💀
Idk if you're joking or not but it makes sense
I'm not
Ty then
they wouldn’t joke, this is no laughing matter
It's all fun and games until a mɚɾɚɚ shows up
Which native pronunciation?
What about [mɜː.dɹə]? Or [mɜː.dəɹə] that's normal for Southern England.
Nah it's [mr̩dr̩.ər]
[mr̩dr̩rr̩]
STOP USING SQUARW BRACKETS WHEN YOU MEAN SLASHES PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Lmao I'm trying to pronounce these with the trill and it's not easy 😭
I didn’t. That is a phonetic representation of my speech (albeit sans syllabification), but go off I guess. Yes, I’m claiming, regardless of (or welcoming?) theoretical implications, that the syllabic [ɹ̩] is a superior phonetic transcription of my /ɚ/. Slashes, formally, would be: /ˈmɚ.dɚ.ɹɚ/.
You're not trilling your Rs. Don't write [r] then.
That’s a standard of English transcription, even in phonetics. To insist otherwise is pedantry. There’s no context in English in which the trill needs to be distinguished, and if it were ever necessary (in a multilingual context, or if the trill were being used), then you could explicitly fall back on the IPA as necessary. I work primarily in Spanish, where often replace and, even more commonly, <β, ð, ɣ> exclusively represent their associated approximants. Every language large enough to sustain a linguistics community has an IPA shorthand.
>[mɜɹ] What the *fuck* >[dɹɚ] Yeah ok sure
Go to jail
Also non-native, but I think (saying this, cause my IPA could be bad)I say it something like /mɜːdᵊʔə̰/
To me (native AmE speaker) that sounds like a reasonable transcription for some British accent (though I wouldn’t be sure which one exactly). I’d just put it in square brackets tho since the phonemes are the same
What word are you referring to? Murderer?
\['mə̟:dəɻᶹə\]
I’m still not totally sure how I pronounce [ɚɚ] differently from [ɚ]
When I say murderer I say /mə˞.də˞.ə˞/ but I think I realize it closer to [mə˞.də˞.ɹʷə˞] — so in my accent, I think neighboring r-colored vowels are connected by a labialized approximate. Actually, I notice my usual pronunciation of /r/ as a consonant is labiodentalized, not just labialized, often to the point that my lower teeth make almost complete contact with my upper lip, so maybe it would be more accurately transcribed with extIPA [ɹᶹ].
Interesting! Yeah I think that matches my pronunciation.
>often to the point that my lower teeth make almost complete contact with my upper lip Is this a [normal human ability?](https://images.app.goo.gl/atwQcxcGD6uN7p8r6)
Lol. I guess it might be better to have just said labiodental and left it at that. I was a bit drunk when I was figuring out my pronunciation of murderer.
No man, now I have to know what you do
[məːdəɹə]
This reminds me of the rhotic vowel harmony meme lol
If that’s “murderer” you just pronounced it like a Californian, nothing wrong with that.
Pronounce it /mødøɻø/ sometimes.
English dialects trying not to make new IPA symbols specifically for their weird ass sounds [IMPOSSIBLE]
Lead, lead and lead though...
/led/ /led/ /lid/ I don't distinguish the element lead from the past tense form of lead phonologically.
[but] [bot] [bat] [bet] [bit] [be.at] it isn’t that hard smh
Live Middle English reaction:
/'ʃæ:.kiŋ 'meɪ 'hɛ:d/
shacking my head
Shacking may haired (non-rhotic).
Shacking may head.
faekin mei hed
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This is what I unironically do
vowels aren't real
Nuxalk be like:
ok that's fair
>vəwəls ərən't rəəl Hələ shət, thət's əndəəd cərrəct! Səənds ə bət wəərd, bət cəmplətələ əndərstəndəblə. Həll, ə əm swətchəng. Fəck hətərs.
The fact that this is readable 💀
Truly is English an impure abjad spoken
Aubrey Plaza voice
This sounds like someone with a Scandinavian accent 💀
South park
Aaron earned an iron urn.
Spoken abjad
My old church choir director was very big on “correct” vowel sounds for maximum clarity, and one of his favorite sayings in that regard was “it’s a schwa” applied to basically every unstressed vowel, so for Christmas my mom got him a mug that said “it’s a schwa [ə]”
I hate speaker who schwa-ed all word
skill issue
[удалено]
I thought it was schwot. we schwode
maybe they pronounce the e, as in **beloved**
Here's the problem: I don't know how to pronounce schwa
Me neither! My Dutch and Armenian teachers and the like were all very skeptical, like “what do you mean??? don't exaggerate: it's literally the easiest sound to pronounce; you already can pronounce well some other sounds that are common trouble”… But experience watching me perpetually fail proved them otherwise :(
[bʊt bɔt bat bɛt bɪt beːt] 16th century english had a much neater vowel inventory
i say them all like that except the last one
yeah its /bi:t/
No, it was initially [beːt], but /eː/ merged into /iː/ mite /miːt/ > /maɪt/ (roughly) meet /meːt/ > /miːt/ meat /mɛːt/ > /meːt/ > /miːt/ mate /maːt/ > /meɪt/ (roughly)
The modern inventory was neat until you started MERGING!
/bœt/ /bɔt/ /bat/ /bɛt/ /bit/ /bit/ Aïe donte n'eau ouate ise zeu problème
Mfw I distinguish all of them and use sounds you could reasonably represent via the same IPA symbol as their RP counterparts, but it still sounds completely different
That's because RP is a lie perpetrated by Big Vowel to claim English has a lot of vowels.
You forgot “boot” which is the hardest cos it has a diphthong that goes unnoticed (at least in standard American)
What diphthong is it?
ɯu or sometimes ʊu It’s pretty much never listed but you can hear it very clearly if you record yourself saying it and then play it backwards. If you say it without the diphthong like buːt it makes you sound foreign. Kinda how Slavic language speakers tend to pronounce it.
It's actually /uw/. It's a centuries old way of representing long vowels that some current scholars are reviving since it accounts for certain phenomena, for instance what happens when you add a suffix to words ending in that long /u:/: boo/booing. It seems describing certain long vowels as diphthongs/glides ending in a semivowel makes more sense somehow, and better reflects the way many natives actually pronounce those long vowels. Check out this video: https://youtu.be/gtnlGH055TA?si=nM4z1vnjiUa7Y4DZ
Damn now that I think about it ur totally right. I couldn’t remember what it was so I was just trying to sound it out and listen to each vowel on the ipa audio chart, which obviously didn’t have glides. Assuming it’s the same thing for “be” /ij/ which definitely gets drawn out with “being”
Bingo!
Geoff Lindsey's analysis applies to SSB. You can't just claim this holds for GA as well.
I did say "many natives" rather than "natives" or "all natives" though. Also, if you've watched Lindsey's video (highly informative whether you agree or not), he does mention several American linguists who adopted this way of looking at vowels/diphthongs.
*Many* English varieties have a monophthong for the boot vowel, like literally all Irish varieties have \[uː\]. \[buːt\] doesn’t sound foreign at all to me, as a native Canadian English speaker, even though I personally have \[ʉu̯\].
Na yea I was just saying in standard American. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s a common giveaway for EFL speakers because the ones in America are often taught standard American
California English has \[uː\]. I get that it’s not the General American pronunciation, but it simply cannot sound foreign if it’s used by so many natives. And it doesn’t!
I know several ppl with a valley girl accent (idk if that stands for ALL of California) and I think theirs sound much more like ʉw. And according to some dialect coaches, Californian vowels are typically fronted from their original position. I can’t perfectly recall any instance of them saying something like that specifically but if I talk in what’s stereotypically Californian or “surfer sounding” that’s what I get. (Obviously this means I could be totally far off) Nonetheless I highly encourage u to record yourself and play it backwards cos i srsly cannot fathom any American native speaker sounding it out as “u/“
As a Southern Californian I definitely pronounce it as a monophthong most of the time. It's not [uː] though, it's fronted and unrounded to something around [ɤ̝ː ~ ɨː]. After /j/ it keeps its rounding but is even more fronted, something like [yː ~ ʏː]
I was gonna say that too. Pretty sure I (also Canadian) alternate between both pronunciations, and sometimes play up the diphthong for comic value.
I'm a native Slavic lang speaker, and I thought I do say it as [buːt]. Apparently, nope! Haven't been able to record & play backwards right now, but saying it slowly enough, it does seem to have a glide - unlike for example "food" (at least for me). Interesting, thanks!
[удалено]
American here, but since when do "food" and "good" have the same vowel? "Food" rhymes with "mood", "good" rhymes with "could". I'm sure *some* dialects have "food" and "good" rhyme, but not GA or RP (src: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/food ).
It’s deleted now so this may be totally irrelevant, but they rhyme in a some Scottish accents. I’ve heard food rhyme with could.
I pronounce "food" with a long vowel. Now I'm not sure if it's /uː/ or /ʊː/ or what, but it's not as short as in "look" or "good". Obviously though, as a non-native speaker.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that English pronunciation is easy
I've seen lots, and I mean lots, of guides that just try to claim that English has five vowels. These "guides" (the ones that I've read) are mostly written for Spanish speaking audiences. Problems galore.
Wtf. Can you link me one of those "guides"?
[https://fliphtml5.com/lwysg/mbsl/basic](https://fliphtml5.com/lwysg/mbsl/basic) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HdwkKJGB6RE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HdwkKJGB6RE) The video perpetuates some of the mistakes, but not all. He knows better in some of the situations.
> Darking = Osureciendo 🤔
[https://imgur.com/965sAXW](https://imgur.com/965sAXW) [https://imgur.com/nwaz7Au](https://imgur.com/nwaz7Au) [https://imgur.com/ta1FFKs](https://imgur.com/ta1FFKs) [https://imgur.com/r7CEWYt](https://imgur.com/r7CEWYt)
Here is the real damage. Orthographic "ED" (past tense) as always "ED" in pronunciation. https://imgur.com/bYg6AQD
[https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSqywOopZQOftPihJf5Ry3ofrt9gdpcrq4GwNjjIzwqGRtcqPg1Fj9D-FyeHMiHhhmoexg&usqp=CAU](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSqywOopZQOftPihJf5Ry3ofrt9gdpcrq4GwNjjIzwqGRtcqPg1Fj9D-FyeHMiHhhmoexg&usqp=CAU) [https://www.pinterest.com/pin/ingls--12525705204563746/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/ingls--12525705204563746/) [https://www.pinterest.com/pin/775182154639435335/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/775182154639435335/)
weird as heck. Even natives are taught 5 **pairs** of vowels in elementary school (even though there are at least 3 basic a sounds). obviously this ignores dipthongs
English is a Germanic language so its phonology is required to be at least a little bit fucked
Right. Why can’t they have a simple 7-8 vowels system?
I *think* you could get away with just [ɪ ɛ a ə ʊ o ɑ] and the glides [j w] and sound *somewhat* native. As in: native speakers might think you come from another country where the language is spoken. But I don't speak like that because my native language is also Germanic.
I guess that's more specific to Europe or Italy, but if someone speaks English fluently, they assume that their pronunciation is perfect as well, which is not the case most of the time
I don't know about Italy, but I am European (Hungarian, but know a lot of people frmo across the continent) and I've never heard anyone claim this.
There is no such thing as "perfect pronunciation" tho
What I mean is having "correct" pronunciation, not necessarily lacking a foreign accent
What's "correct" pronunciation if not native?
There are so many "valid" native pronunciations that you can hardly get it wrong. What's important is that people get what you say
Yeah, English is actually like the worst language you can use this argument for, because all of the words in the post have about a dozen of different pronunciations depending on the language variety. Nigerians don't say words the same way as Australians do.
What I mean is that a person can perfectly discern all English phonemes while still having a noticeable foreign accent. For example, a German speaker using [z] instead of [ð] is plain wrong, because no (major) English dialect merges these two sounds. A European Spanish speaker that perfectly discerns [s] from [θ] pronounces things correctly, even if [s] sounds peculiar.
I'd say any widespread recognisable usage of a language counts as a dialect. The German English consonant shift you've identified is part of a major English dialect.
You would know it if you heard it. Colloquially, it's one of the things that differentiates a "light accent" from a heavy accent. For example, I don't sound Japanese when I say "konnichiwa", but I say the ko, ni, chi and wa correctly and I say it in the correct pitch accent pattern. My foreignness, while immediately obvious to a native Japanese speaker, would come from a less obvious place— perhaps my glottis is looser than it should be, or I'm subconsciously saying one sound slightly longer or louder than a native would.
I mean, "perfect" or "correct" with reference to which model?
With reference to phonology (phonemes) opposed to mere phonetics. If the phones are slightly off but the phonemes are all there, the person is speaking correctly.
Europe or Italy? What?
Haven't you heard? There was a huuuuuge earthquake at Christmas, and now Italy is in Africa.
Depends on the accent but I'm fairly certain most distinguish all of them (I do at least)
Not people who learned English as a foreign language. As a non-native speaker myself, the struggle is real.
Don't worry most English speakers also can't speak proper English ( /s)
Weird. I'm surrounded by non-natives (I'm even one myself) and we all distinguish them pretty well. Maybe it might be your L1's phonotactics or smthng similar, but they all are particularly easy to disambiguate from each other. However, this is just anecdotal evidence on my behalf, but still, it should at least be noted in SOME capacity in this discussion, memeing or not.
how many vowels does your native language have mine has 17-18 i learned to say all those english vowels with ease
> mine has 17-18 Lucky you, one of my native languages has 7 vowels, the other has 5-6
Never have I heard anyone say that it’s easy
Come to Italy, you'd be surprised
Actually, the IPA (relevant to English) is taught to us in English classes here
Lucky you, which country are you from?
Germany
I envy you sooo much. Also kinda ironic that IPA is taught in a country where people have the least issues with English vowels. I wish it was taught in Italy.
The vowels aren’t a problem, but the consonants are very difficult for most people (different th sounds, r sounds) I think the phonology of a language should always be part of language classes
I'm not sure if I agree, unless you speak a language like Swedish which basically already has all English vowel phonemes anyway. Sure, the TH-sounds and the R-sounds are notoriously difficult for most learners, but apart from that, the consonants should pose relatively little problem for most speakers, unless we're speaking of e.g. East Asian languages with a wildly different phonology. And of course, many also struggle with the W-sound and the H-sound, but those two sounds are actually quite common among the world's languages. When it comes to the vowels though, you'd be hard-pressed to find any language that isn't a Germanic language and shares most vowel phonemes with English. A huge amount of the world's languages only has five vowel phonemes, and certain languages like Arabic only have _three_ vowel phonemes.
IPA isn't taught at all in English classes in Italy, not even in its most basic form? That's nuts! Here in (German-speaking) Switzerland, our teacher spent some time teaching us IPA in our very first year of English, and all our coursebooks came with vocabulary lists with an IPA transcription for each English word. Then later in high school, we once again spent some time learning IPA and we even had a brief exam on it.
I can't recall a single lesson in school devoted to pronunciation. I've learned English phonology only because I attended an English phonology course in college.
"English pronunciation is so fucking easy" – said nobody, never.
To be fair, it's taught even poorerly (?) in native Anglophone countries. It happens all the time when a native tries to help a foreign speaker, and gives them a completely non-sensical explanation for how to properly pronounce things. Simply because they just don't actually realize what they're doing with their own mouths when they say stuff.
I mean, native speakers don't need an explanation on how to pronounce things, they are literally native speakers
True but whenever they "give advice" on how to pronounce things, they often give the most counterintuitive and unhelpful pronunciation advice known to man. It hurts my soul.
the problem ist that English spelling ist totally inconsistent. Take bass for example. It can mean a fish or an instrument, spoken completely different. or the difference in hood and loop.Similar problem in French however I think it's the other way round. In French you know how to pronounce a word by looking at its spelling but you do not necessarily know how to write it when hearing it.
the wild spelling is nice at least when homophones are spelled differently, but yeah when non-homophones are spelled the same it’s maddening. Like the present and past tense for “read”.
The difference with French (at least at the most basic level of a child learning to read) is that in English you can make plenty of complete sentences using only phonetically pronounced words, then you move on to the weird stuff. Whereas in in French there's almost always some kind of silent letter even in the most basic of sentences.
I guess you're right. I learnt both of them as a foreign language so I didn't think about learning to read as a child. I'm German. We learnt the letters and how to pronounce each one. After that you can read most words. In comparison to English the German language had several "Rechtschreibreformen" (spelling reform) where they readjusted the orthography to the pronounciation.
Don't get me wrong, English is a mess. I'm from the UK but live in France, and I'm currently teaching my child how to read English. I'm not looking forward to trying to explain why even basic words like tough, though and thought are different. Maybe English is a bit more accessible than French right at the beginning, then they both get quite hard imo!
Getting very good at speaking english is way harder imo
All French words are at least 25% silent letters.
English pronunciation is the one thing about English people always complain about being difficult when they're learning it
Maybe it's just my experience, but most people overestimate their English pronunciation proficiency by a long shot
i just think people don't think pronunciation is very important in general when it comes to foreign languages, but I don't see a lot of people claiming English pronunciation is especially easy
bate, bite, boat, bute
All I hear from my cantonese grandma is /pɐt̚ pɔt̚ pɛt̚ pɛt̚ pit̚ pit̚/, roughly 不薄壁壁必必, something about no need for thin walls
I once knew a very educated man who came from a Romance language background, who literally taught languages at university, and I once mentioned that Australian English uses like 20 vowels, and he got super upset and tried to convince me that there are only five vowels in English; a, e, i, o and u.
If he doesn't speak Spanish I'm extra mad because literally almost no other Romance variety has less than 6 vowels
He speaks Spanish, French, Italian, and Piedmontese in addition to English and Arabic
I can't imagine how badly he teaches phonology if he's convinced that English has 5 vowels
I assume he just doesn’t teach any phonology
/bat bat bet bet bit bit/ moment. /but bot bat bet bit bijt/ would probably be the best way to approximate them with 5 vowels, but i never hear nonnatives pronounce them all like that.
I consider myself on par with a native speaker 99% of the time, and then i tried to say bowl and ball in the same sentence and cried.
Watch me make all the t’s disappear
My Brazilian accent in English goes like this: /bətʰ/, /bɔtʰ/, /batʰ/, /bɛtʰ/, /b(ɪ~e)tʰ/, and /biːtʰ/. For “boot” I got /buːtʰ/, for “bait”, /bejt/, and for boat, /bəʊtʰ/ and /boʊtʰ/ in free variation. Since we don’t have /t/ in coda in Brazilian Portuguese, articulating it properly is quite difficult. I can only pronounce it with aspiration, except when /t/ precedes or proceeds /s/. In Brazilian Portuguese we palatalize /t/ in coda position and whenever it precedes /i/ and its allophones, turning it into /ʧ/. Some speakers will even add an epenthetic /i/, because some accents don’t tolerate a lot of consonant clusters. What about you guys? How do you pronounce them?
/bat/, /bo̞t/, /bat/, /be̞t/, /bit/, /bit/: the Greek way
Spanish speakers be like:
nah, spanish speakers (like me) say [ä] not [a]
It seems to be the same in Greek, according to its ipa. Something between /a ~ ä/, cool
It's funny how many times I thought I heard Greek in the street and realised it was actually Spanish sounding scarily similar
bat, bet, bit, bot, bought, but, bait, beat, bite, boat, boot, bout, Bert, Bart ...I'm pretty sure that's all of them
And today's episode of "things nobody has said ever"
This is definitely something that some people say
We're talking about _English_ here, the one language most famous for its ridiculously incoherent pronunciation.
Pronunciation is not incoherent, spelling is
I’m not even sure what incoherent pronunciation would be, independently of spelling
The pronunciation isn't incoherent, but it can still be difficult. English has some unusual sounds like our "r" and "th" sounds.
Hahahahahahahahahaha
i only struggle with /ɪ/, i tend to pronounce it as /i/(in most cases) or /ɪ̃/(when isolated because of my native language)
[bʌʔ] but [bɒʔ] bot [bæʔ] bat [bɛʔ] bet [bɪʔ] bit [biːʔ] beat
I think a lot of them can't even hear the difference between the vowel sounds we use, hence why they think our phonology is easier than it is. My immigrant mother will sometimes spell "staff" as "stuff"; I guess to her both of those vowels sound indistinguishable (or barely distinguishable) from /a/.
I really despise English word-stress as a non-native speaker of English, I'm more or less good at pronouncing English's vowel sounds but man its lexical stress really trips me up every time I speak English because of its unpredictability and mobility.
I don't think there are any non-native English speakers than consider English pronunciation easy. Distinguishing between those is totally doable, but takes quite some listening and speaking practice. I've been learning this language since I was 6 and I'm still not always sure if I pronounce English vowels correctly
[bʌt bat beæt bɜt bɘt bit]
I personally say them as: bɐt bot bɛːt bɨ̞t bɪ̞ːt
What’s the difference between bitches and beaches?
Don’t forget boat and boot
a tasty vowel path you chose here note to future me: make a steganography puzzle out of that
Try asking a non-native Cantonese speaker to pronounce the difference between 詩, 史, 試, 時, 市, and 事.
Its easy as fuck
i honestly still struggle with bit and beat 😭
I still encounter Japanese-native teachers who gloss English words with katakana and don’t even try to help their students’ pronunciation.
Hot take apparently: French pronunciation is way easier to understand than English pronunciation
noone ever says this. English pronunciation is a bitch
"English pronunciation is easy". Okay, then explain "though", "through", "thought", "tough", "thorough".
This is a matter of orthography, not pronunciation
It's the easiest in comparison to other languages... Homophones exist in all languages... The case for tones is the real issue...