People are giving pronunciation tips for other languages in the comments, here are tips for polish. Polish often seems incomprehensible for english speakers because of the sheer amount of consonants though it actually flows quite nicely if you know the rules 'sz', 'cz' - those are equivalent to 'sh' (shop,shell) and 'ch' (chop, check) 'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anythin…
Also, in Polish a regular 'c' is pronounced approximately like an English 'ts'
You're making some very broad generalizations, which is why you are puzzled IMO. Firstly, "English speakers" includes many people who speak multiple languages. Technically, English speakers also includes people who are non-native English speakers, who by definition know another language. Secondly, there are many native English speakers who speak a second language, or who are at least exposed enough to second language…
In my (limited) experience there is no discernible difference between Americans and British people mispronouncing Italian (or German, for that matter) and to a degree Spanish words. I think this is what the parent poster meant. If your native language is English AND you don't know any others, then your mispronunciations will be similar.
This, exactly. I also saw a quite big difference between monolingual English speakers and Italian speakers. The average monolingual Italian speaker that has had a basic exposure to certain English words through TV or media in general WILL definitely mispronounce the words, but the result is never so corrupted and garbled to result incomprehensible to an English speaker. For instance, the average Italian might pronounce a word like "cocktail" as /ˈkoktɛl/ instead of the correct English /ˈkɒkteɪl/, or "underground" as /andɛrˈgraund/ instead of /ʌndəˈɡɹaʊnd/; I've yet to find an English speaker that hasn't studied Italian that doesn't do butcherings like /ʃəˈbɑːda/, which an Italian won't definitely recognize as "ciabatta" due to the fact that it is supposed to sound /tʃaˈbatta/. I think it's a process somewhat similar to how Japanese corrupts loanwords, but in the other direction: English has a vastly larger array of sounds compared to Italian, so speakers somewhat fail to understand that Romance languages (except French and friends, but we don't talk about French) are usually much "flatter" in sound than your average Germanic language with 16 vowels.
At least English speakers often try to pronounce names correctly, for example celebrities and well known sports stars. Not that we always succeed, and many people don’t care! Bach, Cézzane, Jesus, Jahn etcetera. I notice Spanish people don’t seem to try, I think in part because there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and pronunciation in Spanish. The common Spanish pronunciation of Michael Jackson is unint…
Don't know what kind of Spanish speaker you spoke to, but no Spaniard/Latin-American I know would pronounce a famouse people name lke Michael Jackson "wrong".
Not the original commenter, but I'll try to explain because something similar happens in Italy as well
It's not a "wrong" pronunciation, but it's clearly influenced by how Spanish/Italian stresses individual letters way more than English.
Let's take Hillary Clinton as another example: Italians pronounce it "Heel-lah-ree Clean-tone" (/ˈilari ˈklinton/), which is way different from the actual pronunciation.
Some people take this idea to heart a bit too much. Barely anyone can pronounce my name properly and I really don't bat an eye at it. It's not pragmatic to expect most people to do so, especially in a place like the US where so many people come from different backgrounds. And that's nothing to say about the fact that the same name, written the same way, can be pronounced very differently depending on the bearer's bac…
My last name is French, but in reality the name comes from Germany. My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly for 100 years, and I … just don’t care enough to enforce the correct pronunciation. It feels snobbish to me, like you said. Might be an artifact of being an American.
> My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly
Well, the French usage for names generally is just to use either a straight French pronunciation based on how the name is written, or an approximation of the foreign pronunciation using sounds that exist in French. Only a handful of well-known names get to have a special pronunciation.
If your family has been in France for 100 years, I wouldn't say they pronounce the name "incorrectly", they just pronounce it the correct way in France.
I was wondering if someone could comment on the pronunciation of "q" in Chinese (Mandarin). From time to time the advice that "q" is pronounced as "ch" pops up. While I have no issues with "q" sounding like "ch" in "quan", but it bothers me that the "q" in "qian" sounds nothing like "ch" to me. Thank you very much in advance! Edit: added "but", "to me".
Native Chinese speaker here. I tried to tell the difference between "q" and "ch" here by pronouncing them. As the other comment noted, "ch" is actually a valid pinyin as well, so they are definitely different. My observation is that for "q" your tongue tip is closer to your teeth and for "ch" your tongue tip is somewhere in the middle of the mouth. Hope that helps.
Yeah, Łukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally online because the correct letters can be inferred from the context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were…
> it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter Is it still common? It was popular when there were many encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r in English :)
I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may be that I'm the only one
Is this actually true for English speakers? Especially prominent Latin names have been totally butchered. For example Markus Antonius always gets butchered as Mark Anthony which clearly isn't a name anyone in Rome would have had. This also seems to go hand in hand with the general ignorance of the huge problem that's the great vowel shift that messes everything up for native English speakers pronouncing words from ot…
No one is reading "Markus Antonius" and pronouncing it as "Marc Anthony". A few historical figures have Anglicized names for whatever reasons, so we use those.
That is some Latin name translation thing. Christopher Columbus (EN), Cristóbal Colón (ES), Christophe Colomb (FR), and Cristoforo Colombo (IT) are all Christophorus Columbus (his original Latin name). Edit: the same things happen with Ancient Greek names - one person has different spellings and pronunciations in different languages — look up 荷马 or ソクラテス.
My name is Freek, a sort-of common Dutch name, usually people call me Frank from the start (when the name is not written anywhere and they only hear it being said), I'll leave it at that for Starbucks situations. Otherwise, in a Teams chat for example, people see my name and they call me Freak hesitantly. If I leave it like that they start to use it with more confidence. For long term relations I tell people to pronounce it like "Frake" (like brake and snake), which is very close to how it sounds if a Dutch person says my name.
Over time, I've come to see my name as a nice conversation starter.
At least English speakers often try to pronounce names correctly, for example celebrities and well known sports stars. Not that we always succeed, and many people don’t care! Bach, Cézzane, Jesus, Jahn etcetera. I notice Spanish people don’t seem to try, I think in part because there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and pronunciation in Spanish. The common Spanish pronunciation of Michael Jackson is unint…
Don't know what kind of Spanish speaker you spoke to, but no Spaniard/Latin-American I know would pronounce a famouse people name lke Michael Jackson "wrong".
It was in Spain, say 20 years ago, and they pronounced it as though it was Spanish words. I suspect you know a different demographic from that I knew.
Wszystko and Lewandowski both are subjected to the same principle, namely: in Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_d...
I wonder if there is a rule that lets people get away with "Lewandoski" :)
Rule of thumb of consonant clusters in mos languages: break the cluster. Don't try to pronounce "VSK" directly. Instead, split it and add different parts to syllables before and after: Le-van-dov-ski. Adding "ski" after the word is much easier than dealing with three consonants in a row