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.
Kernel
I always pronounced “only” as “on-lie”. I heard other people say “only” and couldn’t understand what they meant.
Don’t feel bad, everyone. English pronunciation IS difficult, though through tough thorough thought, you can do it!
Worcestershire sauce
It helps to break it up.
worce - ster - shire
“Worcestershire sauce is the worst.”
“Thousand island is worster.”
“‘Worster’? Sure.”
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.
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. :)
Rural and squirrel
Oh god yes
German?
‘Anthropomorphous’ is still like a tongue twsiter for me
I mean as a first language speaker, it is.
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.
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.”
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.
[the]
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 personally am having a hard time with “overwhelmingly”
“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
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.
