As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years.
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.
There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood.
There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, even though it is clear that English is their second (or third) language. I believe the hardest part is to learn how to make sounds that do not exist in your native language (both consonants and vowels). But the good news is that there are ways to learn that. The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.
The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound. So trying to make the sounds out of the letters will always be a frustrating endeavor, as there will never be a single rule you can follow.
>English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Spanish does have a regulatory agency (RAE) that we choose to follow, but AFAIK, they don't say anything about pronunciation. Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Colombia all have different pronunciations and not one is more official than the other. There's a certain sense of what's "normal" or nearer the center of gravity for most speakers, but I think that's true for English too (new zealand or south african English is less "standard" than a Midwestern accent or BBC English)
You are partially right in that Italian is not perfectly phonetic, but it's in such a different league from English that (100% - Italian) is a rounding error with respect to (sanity -English) ;-)
Still, Italian is still perfectly phonetic in writing: can you imagine never having to ask how to spell a town name, or a family name? Can you imagine a word where spelling bees do not exist because they could make no sense? If you hear it, you can spell it.
By the way, your example of "tʃ, dʒ" is spot on, as in you cannot guess how a Z character is to be read, but in practice very few people ever notice. Concerning "ŋ", I think only Italian linguists know about it as a separate phoneme.
You are wrong, instead, about "ɲ": "gn" is always pronounced as in "gnocchi".
>The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.
This is only partially true: the language a person speaks affects the development of facial muscles used to make those sounds. So trying to speak a different language that uses different muscles can be very difficult. Of course, as you said, it's a matter of practice: with enough practice, you can develop those muscles, just like pumping weights in a gym.
This is 100% correct. Muscles that aren't used in your mouth/articulators (because your native language doesn't require them) atrophy over time. It is possible to strengthen these muscles with isolated practice -- on BoldVoice we have coach videos where they give you "reps" of muscle movements (such as 20 tongue-ups). We call it "a gym for your mouth" :D It's hard work, but it's the best way to get results.
> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Oh come on. The fact that there is no regulatory body doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about "English pronunciation" in a general way. And Spanish and German have different dialects , accents and pronunciations too.
> The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound
I had no idea this would exist. I guess it makes sense that people would try to do something like this, but also, to my English addled brain, not much sense to expend the effort.
Oh, it's a huge effort! These bodies meet and discuss what the proper spelling of words should be, or they make up new words, and then they publish those guidelines for journalists, authors, and anyone who wants to speak "properly" to follow.
It gives the language a good balance between spelling and pronouncing - that's why you can pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written (I think there are very very few exceptions, if at all). But this comes at a price of losing ability to track meaning some times.
I don’t think that the existence of those bodies is the reason for being able to pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written.
Afaik there is no such regulatory body for Russian language, and yet as long as you know the alphabet, you should be able to pronounce almost every single word correctly (even if you have never seen or heard it before).
There are a few exceptions, but I cannot even recall them right now, aside from super common ones that make natural sense. Example: “что” aka “chto”, with “ch” being pronounced more like “sh” (which would naturally end up happening if you try pronouncing it as written aka “chto” a few times).
Most of these are just pretending to have any authority.
In particular for French, l'Académie Française is pretty much a joke, with mostly ecclesiastics above 80 years old, no linguists involved, and nothing produced in the last 50 years.
Practice and willingness to fail and clown around is key. As an english teacher I've always liked to bring up cross-lingual interference - you're always going to accidentally bring in sounds from your own language into the one you're learning.
I'm no linguist, but English has also drawn a lot from other neighboring languages. Understanding a bit of French, Dutch or German helps a lot with understanding which English words are pronounced in which way. It's not random is what I mean.
I once knew a EU parlament translator and linguist with 6+ languages under his belt. When he visited us in Poland he would not shut up - he tried reading every sign, every word, kept asking how it's pronounced. Just continuously played with language, like a software developer does with code. When he was leaving after a two day stay he had a lot of Polish quite well figured out, it was really impressive. But he was just really willing to fail over and over and over in all social interactions.
The set of meaningful sounds (phonemes) is pretty conservative though. They can be rendered very differently (and that's what we call "accent" in native speakers), but it's like moving a densely connected graph around in the soundspace — yes the particular sounds might shift, but it's the relation between them that encodes meaning, and that is preserved. In that sense "English pronunciation" does exist.
> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Well well... as it is called English, scholars from cultural institutions rooted in England are the reference. Everybody else is free to speak their own language, but one is proper English, while the others are at most somewhere-English.
That’s a particularly bad example, as accents vary more within England than in most other English speaking countries. Cockneys and Geordies sound nothing alike and there is no way to have unified and consistent spelling between them.
Don't worry; English pronunciation can be mastered simply through tough, thorough thought.
(English "o" is tons of fun-- of the 22 vowel sounds listed on the English orthography page on Wikipedia, only two can't generally have the letter "o" involved.)
I have seen similar joke poems but this one was too much for me. I even saw words I never heard of before, like "sward". For anyone like me - it's a lawn or a meadow.
> word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound
That it why we spell it as "colour" in English. Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so.
Learning Dutch really opened my eyes as to how terrible English is as a written language. The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president. We don't even have a formal written constitution.
This is completely incorrect. "Color" was spelled "color" in England throughout its history. "Colour" was a later variant that came along later and existed alongside "color" for many years. America eventually standardized on the "color" variant and the UK standardized on the "colour" variant. If you have any doubts about this, you can search on books.google.com for +"color" and look through books published in the UK to see that this is the case. For example, here is a book published in 1756 printed in London by an Irishman in which he consistently uses "color":
You can find many other things of interest in here, like the use of the medial s, which only died out in the mid 1800s and makes reading old texts very annoying.
It's important to remember that for centuries in English, there was no such thing as standardized spelling. You spelled it how you felt it should be spelled. This extended even to people's own names. This didn't really change until the late 1700s-1800s.
Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin "color" via the Old French "color."
No. That was due to french influence. Not to be more phonetic.
> Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so.
Webster removed it to make it more phonetic. Do you pronounce color the same way as flour? Of course not. Color, harbor, favor, etc is more phonetically accurate than colour, harbour, favour, etc.
> The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president.
We get annoyed about having to learn genders of words in other languages. It's just so silly! Then you remember that millions of children pick it up every day.
Nothing in language can actually be hard. It just takes enough practice to start thinking like a native.
But note I said practice, not repetition. You have to want to do it correctly. If you have an ear for correctness you will get there.
Native children spend thousands of hours learning language. Just because a child can do it through some of the greatest effort of their lives at that point doesn't make it easy surely?
I definitely didn't mean to say learning languages as an adult is easy because children do it. I've always thought methods like Rosetta Stone are complete crap because, as you say, we don't have thousands of hours to put into this like children do.
But what we do have is the most powerful tool we know for learning: language! Adults use their already acquired language to make learning a new language easier.
What I really meant, though, is there's nothing fundamentally "hard" about most things in everyday language. Being "hard" is quite hard (heh) to define but some things are intuitively hard, for example, playing Stravinsky's Petrouchka is always going to be considered a remarkable achievement for a piano player. But natural languages aren't like this. They are almost by definition easy because they are natural. If it was hard people would figure out an easier way to talk.
I'm based in the US, where it's spelled without the "u". Quite a few examples of this spelling difference - humo(u)r, behavio(u)r etc. Oh and "spelt" is "spelled". Isn't English fun! :)
Even weirder, as a Native American English speaker, I would have spelt that word this way in only this context, but in other contexts it’s spelled this way.
Maybe this is my own idiosyncrasy though and not what others would do. I’ve never even thought about it until just now.
As a native English speaker, I love videos that point out all the details I never think about but must be maddening for non-native speakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BYmA5V5Cyg
As a Canadian living in the US, this is the bane of my existence. The disappearance of Ts from so many words and phrases irks me:
- bouny hunner
- innerview
- alannic ciddy
- Rocky Mounins
- haunid house
- udderly
- budder (the bagel topping)
- winner (the season)
- bidder (the taste)
- invennive
- annie-American
- bedder
- odder (the cute wadder mammal)
The inventive ways that Ts are dropped in favor of:
- Ns
- Ds
- glottal stops
- nothing at all
are legion.
I've mused about publishing a compilation of these words with dropped Ts, but it's hit-or-miss whether the other person in America who cares would buy the book.
> I've mused about publishing a compilation of these words with dropped Ts, but it's hit-or-miss whether the other person in America who cares would buy the book.
There are probably more people than that that care, but most of them would probably prefer something more like the broad description of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl... rather than a catalog of words exhibiting one (or, rather, parts of a couple, related vy the starting sound) of the listed consonant shifts.
It's an amusing work of high-vocabulary words with an excerpt from actual usage with the definition and etymology. Catamite, for example, is memorably demonstrated with, I believe, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers":
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
I have a strong Jersey accent to the point where I need a separate "work voice". Mostly I just focus on neutralizing the vowels, which has the side effect of restoring the consonants a bit. What I didn't realize was the extent to which the consonants stand out to people.
Yesterday, I saw an automatic caption of a Youtube video that said "admission" instead of "emission" (which is what I heard the speaker say, and certainly was the intention). The line is very thin indeed.
The one I have most problems with is "Toronto". Every time I've heard it said out loud by somebody from North America, it has sounded like "Turrawnno", with the T's barely audible.
On the other hand, my (very Punjabi) family members who actually live there pronounce it "Turronto", with hard T's, rolling R's, and a heavy emphasis on the final T. If you've heard the most common form of the Indian English accent, you know what I mean.
So now I just call it "that city in Canada". I just know I'll mangle it if I say it out loud.
Fwiw this was highly amusing to read. All of these I read in isolation and thought "no I pronounce the t there" then said in a sentance and yeah... youre dead on
Did you forget ann ar?dic - for Antarctic. What is that ?d sound? WHY is that sound?
Oh and eeeand. The word and used to be monosyllabic.
I bet there are a list of words where the loss of each of the 26 letters can be lamented. For example (off the top of my head), the a in head, the b in dumb, the first c in necklace, the d in handsaw ...
The main issue really is that there are no rules for pronunciation. It's not as bad as reading Chinese (as far as I understand - I tried to learn for a month and gave up :)), but in the same direction going from a language like Turkish or Spanish that are mostly WYSIWYG - the glyphs in the word don't actually tell you how to pronounce it properly.
My all time favorites are the words that are literally spelled the the same but pronounced differently, for no reason - like "wind".
Or, similar but again pronounced differently - thought, through, though, tough - why are these like that? No (good) reason.
And names, too. Worcester, guess how that's pronounced? :)
There are some rules in English pronunciation, but there are a ton of exceptions and inconsistencies. To give you an example of a reliable rule: when a plural word ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant, the "s" is pronounced as "z" (eyes, dogs), but when it ends in an unvoiced consonant, it's pronounced as "s" (cats).
Our BoldVoice, we like to teach these rules because they are quick wins for most people. Then, a lot of the hard work comes in practicing and memorizing the many, many exceptions.
Tried BoldVoice right now and almost immediately hit a bit of interpolation awkwardness: “Tomorrow, we’ll work on Practice your consonant skills”. Usually I wouldn’t complain about this sort of thing, but in a language learning app it seems out of place. Learners can be really trusting at the most unfortunate times. (Mozilla’s Project Fluent[1] was built to handle these situations in a localization setting, but you can probably get away with something much simpler.) Seems really slick otherwise. Now if only I could take a placement test so I could justify paying for it... But I appreciate that most—possibly literally all—of your target audience are not me.
ETA: Also I just clicked on the site logo on /frequently-asked-questions and got pointed to /old-home-2, which is a 404. I swear I don’t seek out bugs, they come to me all by themselves :)
Oops, that's literally the name of one of our lessons "Practice your consonant skills" hence the awkward string, but I see what you mean. We'll look into handling those more elegantly because I agree, for English learners everything needs to be in perfect English.
And we have a placement test -- it's in the Resources tab, under "Assessment". Lmk how it works for you!
Re: 404... don't know what you're talking about ;)
Hey, thanks for your interest in checking out the app :) Weird that you don't see the Pricing info on that page - did you tap "Pricing" at the top bar, and then tap the first question "How much does BoldVoice cost?"
Either way, the app costs $150/year or $25/month (or your local equivalent). We have a free 7-day trial so you can try it before you commit.
Software Engineer at Boldvoice here, also learning Mandarin. I've been told my Chinese accent is awful due in large part to misuse of tones and overemphasizing articles like 了. We'd love to build something for all languages but are focusing on just users learning english right now.
Difficult to explain. As far as I remember it always showed the CN subtitles and you could with your mouse always see the translation and the meaning of the single characters.
viki and iq are around 5 USD a months so it could still be worth it.
Thanks! For now, we're laser-focused on English since it's the language that 1 billion people are learning (as non-native speakers). But we'd love to add more languages in the future, stay tuned!
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.