111–120 of 341 posts
Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent): Poor pronunciation (I.e. thick accent) but good grammar is usually more forgiven by a native than great pronunciation but poor grammar. Because then you sound more native, but you sound a bit… mentally slow. I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent…
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>but still have a noticeable German accent my German accent only got less notable after speaking a ton of English living in English speaking countries for several years. For some reason losing the accent was way harder than getting rid of an accent in French. Especially words like 'strength'. If German is your first language there is something about 'r' and 'th' sounds that's so hard to get right.
a segment of Americans pronounce that word "shtrenkth", kinda drives me crazy. Colin Powell did, and my little sister does. I have no explanation.
Fifty-five year old true story: I was dating a woman in Buffalo; we're both native speakers. She tells me to meet her at a place on "Gothee" Street, over in the Lovejoy district. I bike over to the east side of town, and search all over for Gothee Street. No luck. Ask a few locals - nada. Spend a half hour looking; eventually give up. Next morning, there's hell to pay. She waited an hour for me. What happened? "It's…
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Yeah I jut looked up some examples from this list https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249 > starting with 'Frome'. The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom". Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)
> As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult? Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation. I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?
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Yeah I jut looked up some examples from this list https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249 > starting with 'Frome'. The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom". Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)
> As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult? Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation. I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?
"My Sequel": 12
"My Ess Kyoo El": 8
"My Squirrel": 0
Just for fun, I looked at how 20 different people pronounced MySQL. The results: "My Sequel": 12 "My Ess Kyoo El": 8 "My Squirrel": 0 I thought "My Sequel" would have something closer to 2/3rds of results rather than 1/2
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That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.
I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word. It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations
I realized there are two types of issues: 1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance). 2. Certain sounds I DID know how to make, but didn't know WHEN to make them because spelling is so unreliable. For example, a word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound - in fact they make two distinct sounds. For these, I realized you just have to practice it until your mouth "remembers" how to pronounce the word differently (i.e. creates muscle memory).
Youglish is great for fine-tuning specific words.
I also recommend BoldVoice (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder). We were YC S21 and built the app to help non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation with videos from Hollywood speech coaches and instant feedback via speech recognition ML.
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Yeah I jut looked up some examples from this list https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249 > starting with 'Frome'. The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom". Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)
> As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult? Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation. I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?
Oops! Hah. It's a town in Northern Ireland.
Actually it had not occurred to me that the gh is silent. Guess when you know how to say a word it's 'obvious' when of course it's not