Bonus points if you can also tell the most common alternate realisation for the specific sound.
Here in The Netherlands a lot of people can’t pronounce the TH sounds, these get turned into to regular plosives. (T/D, Ting, Dis, Dat, instead of: Thing, This, That.)
Some Dutch speakers also have trouble distinguishing between bat and bad, bet and bed or between back, bag, beck and beg. This is because Dutch devoices obstruents at the end of a word. Dutch also does not distinguish between [æ] and [ɛ].
Finally, some pronounce the word idea (in Dutch: idee) without the ending sound, making “Do you have an idea?” and “Do you have an ID?” sound the same.
What are some examples in your language? 🙂
31 comments
Swiss to wannabe-hiker: “Ze [Col de la Forclaz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Col_de_la_Forclaz), in zese boots?!”
Personally it’s really awkward to pronounce things like “word” or “world”, but generally most words that have a “r” in them since we don’t have a “soft r” sound
>Here in The Netherlands a lot of people can’t pronounce the TH sounds, these get turned into to regular plosives. (T/D, Ting, Dis, Dat, instead of: Thing, This, That.)
Same in Bulgaria, me included. Also the sounds between “a” and “e” sometimes.
Danes really struggle on ‘th.’ If they try getting me on one of theirs’ I get them to try ‘through three trees.’ Shuts them up every time.
So I am a native English speaker who has actually just started learning OP’s language.
The hardest thing for me is “ij” correctly. I can get the “g” fine, but “ij” really feels like in between “ay” and “eye” (spelt in English), but I cant quite get it right.
Also rolled “r”s. I just cant.
In terms of what I’ve noticed people trying to speak English is by far the “th” or not saying schwas in the right place. For example, my father who is French pronounces “the salad” as “du Sah-lah-d” not “thu sah-lud”.
I just don’t bother with “th” sounds, it’s either d or t, like you said.
In general tho, it’s more the accent that is difficult to find the motivation to put some effort into.
Luckily we don’t have to do it like the americans and the brits, or even worse, the australians who put r sounds at the end of words that end with o, or a, etc.
– We have the same struggle with “th” and either pronounce it like you described, or we replace it with a “z” sound.
– The English “r” tends to be a struggle because of the U shape that needs to be done with the tongue. The sensation is weird. We’re used to pronouncing it distinctly and the fact it’s almost a “w” in English is disturbing.
– Just like in French, we forget the letter “h” exists and skip it. Pronouncing it is an extra effort I’m not willing to make.
– I have a hard time not pronouncing the letter “t” clearly like we do in French. A word like “priority” for example. I’ll tend to say “pioriTy” when it almost sounds like an “L” when native English speakers say it.
**List of words I despise :**
Rural, thorough, world, ruin, hierarchy, horror, murderer, brewery, jewellery, squirrel.
Also to add in Dutch: The “u” sound in English for words like “fun,” “jump,” “sponge” [*Schwa*] often gets turned into a unique Dutch-sounding variation of /u/ as in “klus” which is its own sound not present in English.
I’ve also noticed that some words like “pull” “full” “could” etc [ʊ] can be harder as there is no sound or words (that I can think of) in Dutch with this sound. Also words like “full” are sometimes accompanied with a softer “w” sound versus a hard “l” sound at the end.
Th becomes s or d, depending on the phonetic environment: “dis sing” for “this thing”. I believe the distribution is along θ/ð ~ s/d. It does not become z because we dont really do voiced plosives. We’re like mandarin in that regard.
The aspiration of plosives is also not really natural to us, and English vowels are a hot mess, especially diphthongs. They get “rounded up” (mathematically, not phonologically) to the closest equivalent in our language. Another feature when we integrate English words into our mouth, is that /k/ becomes an affricate /kx/ when we’re not careful.
And /r/, especially when preceded by consonants. “Bridge over troubled water” is difficult.
Th sound, open /æ/, /ə/, and /3:/. But this can be learnt rather easily (not that everyone can pronounce it). The most difficult thing is word and sentence stress and weak forms. Czech is relatively monotonous and the stress is pretty much always on the first syllable, so it’s tricky for some people to get used to stressing different syllables or words.
> Here in The Netherlands a lot of people can’t pronounce the TH sounds
Which is my personal theory as to why so many of us (you) are fine with using ‘Holland’. Hell, I speak both languages natively and even *I* struggle a bit if I’ve just been speaking a lot of Dutch before switching to English.
For me personally, words that start with ‘S’ like Spain or Start because I always try to pronounce them the spanish way with an ‘E’ before the ‘s’ so I say ‘Espain’ and ‘Estart’. I have to think and concentrate on not pronouncing the ‘e’.
How to recognize a Hungarian accent:
* TH pronounced as T or D, rarely S; I’ve never heard Z
* W pronounced as V
* R pronounced as dental-alveolar rolled R (like in Slavic languages, Spanish, Finnish etc.); I don’t think it’s hard but people don’t always pay attention
* we don’t really have native diphthongs. Depending on how strong the accent is it can be just a bit “off” or “flat”, or they can be outright pronounced as two separate vowels (not “here”, but “he err”).
* we don’t have vowel reduction either, in Hungarian you are supposed to pronounce all vowels clearly. So where it happens in English, we often don’t reduce it to schwa, they are more like the German/Finnish “ö” sound.
* X at the start of words is actually pronounced as KS, not as Z; again, not difficult (even easier), but it’s such a rare thing that most people probably don’t even know that in English it’s just a Z
* a double consonant in Hungarian means that you have to pronounce that consonant long. So we have to train ourselves to pronounce consonants in words like beTTer, haMMer etc. short.
The th sound applies to Swedes as well. And we also have problems pronouncing ch, we say it like sh instead (chit-chat becomes shit-shat). And we often pronounce J the Swedish way, like an English consonant Y .
I’m not sure how much of this is the case for other people. But for a long time I didn’t realise Z wasn’t pronounced like S, J wasn’t pronounced like Y, and Ch wasn’t pronounced like Sh
Where I’m from in the South-East some of us struggle with pronouncing the H, and T in the middle of words, e.g. “Bloody ell, wa’s up wi’dis wa’er”.
Liverpudlians have the same struggles you mention with Th, e.g. “Dey do dough, don’t dey dough”.
And pretty much every accent pronounces the vowels differently.
I’m sure there’s many more examples too.
And that’s only in England, you can get some very odd pronunciations of things in other countries where English is a first language…
Hearing foreigners (even North Americans) trying to say squirrel and mirror properly makes me chuckle.
I’d say them as “skwi-rrell” and “mi-rah”. Both of them have two syllables.
Hearing yanks go “skwirrrrl” and “mirrrrrr” with one syllable is humorous.
For me it was words that start with an ‘h’ such as ‘hair’ (vs ‘air’) and ‘heat’ or ‘hit’ (vs ‘eat’).
In Portuguese we ignore ‘h’s at the start of words, so it took a while to get used to over pronounce the ‘h’s in those cases
No Scottish person can say Irish wrist watch or the name Carl properly. Our Rs are way too harsh and rolled. Carl sounds like Carol. And Irish wrist watch becomes Irish rish rawsh.
I think for Portuguese people the th sounds are often the most problematic to pronounce.
Germans: The soft ‘b’s and ‘d’s at the end of syllables. See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing) for the reason some of us not even notice the difference.
And the ‘th’, of course 😉
Vowels. We only have eight, /a/, /e/, /ɛ/, /i/, /o/, /ɔ/, /u/ and /ə/. The ones of us who have learnt French also know how to pronounce /y/ and /œ/ and maybe some nasals; unfortunately none of them are used in English… We also have semivowels /j/ and /w/ in diphtongs.
And, well, RP has /æ/, /ɑː/, /ɒ/, /ɔː/, /ɪ/, /e/, /ʌ/, /ʊ/, /iː/, /u:/, /ɜː/, /ɛː/, /ə/ and /i/.
As you can see, there’s not much overlapping. So, for example:
* /æ/, /ɑː/ and /ʌ/ become /a/ (the /a/ in /aɪ/ and in /aʊ/ remains /a/)
* /ɪ/, /iː/and /i/ are all /i/; in words like near we do not pronounce neither like RP /ɪə/ nor GA /ir/ but a mix, /iər/
* /e/ stays /e/
* /ɛː/ becomes /ɛ/
* the /ə/ in /əʊ/ in words like goat becomes /o/ (like in GA)
* /ɒ/, /ɔː/ become /ɔ/
* /ʊ/ and /uː/ become /u/
* /ə/ remains the same
* /ɜː/ in words like nurse might oscillate between /u/ if you do not know much English up to /ə/ is you know quite a bit.
Diphtongs:
* /eɪ/ becomes /ej/
* /oʊ/ becomes /ow/
* /aɪ/ becomes /aj/
* /ɔɪ/ becomes /ɔj/
* /aʊ/ becomes /aw/
As a Dutch person myself, I don’t think any of your examples are very good. Yes, all of them are somewhat common mistakes people make but none of them really have a lot to do with troubles related to pronunciation and much more with a lack of teaching, mostly for the older generations. The “idea” example for instance is just an unfamiliarity with the exception you need to know to pronounce the word right, causing people to go for the most common pronunciation for that letter combinations in English. Read, plead, etc. all have the same pronunciation that these people are using. We even have words that have pretty similar word endings in Dutch, mostly derived from Latin. Words like “musea” are pronounced very similar to the English “idea” so it’s not like native Dutch speakers don’t have the sounds required for the word in their toolbox.
Most of your other examples seem to mostly boil down to the older generation that never had English in school. Most younger people pronounce the th-sound and bed/bet or even then/than perfectly fine because teachers actually help them with pronunciation, not just with cramming the vocabulary in there.
Th sound is annoying and combination with r is ugh…like word “Three”, most people say free instead lol.
Also pronunciation of some places, like Why is Arkansas pronounced in such a weird way compared to Kansas lol. I always thought I can say Worcestershire correctly, actual pronunciation of the word is so strange.
The 3748696927 different vowels English has. Spanish has only 5 vowels so we tend to simplify the pronunciation (and since the pronunciation is not even consistent we get it wrong constantly)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFBt8W847U&t=30
You can hear how aeiou are on spanish (and that’s all, there are no alternate or different sounds for the vowels)
As an italian speaker, i struggle with two in particular:
The “th” sound. I pronounce it either as a T or a D, can’t get it right regardless of how much i practice.
The R sound. I grew up with the hard, rolled latin R. So i either go with a comically hard R or i pretty much don’t pronounce it at all.
Some combinations of consonants like the “rl” in words such as “world” or “girl” are difficult too, but more manageable. I just can’t lose the habit of pronouncing both letters individually.
I guess the main issue is being used to a language where every single letter of a word is pronounced. The latin alphabet fits italian much better than it fits english. A word like “queue” will never make sense to me. Or again, a world like “matter” will always be pronounced like “mah tt eh rr”. If i try to pronounce it properly, i end up sounding like i am trying to mock the british by saying “mattah”
As a native American English speaker in Spain. The ‘s’ + consonant is hard for people to get. Basically all vowels. Like most Spanish speakers wouldn’t distinguish between ‘cat’, ‘cot’ and ‘cut’ and basically use a Spanish ‘a’ as a substitute. Most English speakers don’t realize how ubiquitous the schwa is in spoken speech. It’s basically the generic substitute vowel sound.
Plus also don’t really get that English vowels tend to really have a lot of play to them. Like in English if you say ‘pool’ you really say it like ‘pooehl’. A Spaniard would just say ‘Pül”
The hard ‘j’ sound. Like Judge or Jewel is nearly impossible.
‘ng’ tends to be rough which is basically just a guttural hum.
Spain has the unvoiced ‘th’ so it’s actually one of the things that other languages have a hard time with that Spaniards get pretty well. Since it’s easy enough to learn just add some voice. But the main arena in Madrid is called the ‘Wizink’ which sounds very close to ‘We Think’ in English (except the short vowel of course)
/ə/ and /ɪ/. You can tell someone is Spanish or Greek from our vowels.
What do you mean by the “th” sound? There are two distinct sounds represented by those letters, th as in this, and th as in think.
Croats would pronounce this as dis, and think as tink.
I think for Germans it’s exactly the same as for Dutch people. The th doesn’t exist in German, so that’s the hardest to learn. (All other sounds in English are either present in German or easier to learn.)
We also do the bed/bat thing, because German, like Dutch, has final-obstruent devoicing and native speakers without a linguistic education aren’t aware of that and subconsciously apply it even to foreign languages that don’t have it.
My guess is the “th” sound and the reduced “i” sound, none of the two are present in Slovak, although the reduced i is present in Czech.
For example “similar” would sound like sihmihlar.
However, English in general has more vowel sounds (in Slovak there are only 6) since it has reduced ones and shwa, we have æ though as the sixth one after the unreduced a, e, i, o, u.