Pronunciation

Marla_Singer said:
I think tough pronunciation is the same as rough, but as I'm not a native english speaker, I may be wrong. :hmm:
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Ah. I thought that the "ou" was prononced, well, "ou" (english is incredibly frustrating when it comes to phonetic spelling...). I mean like the "ou" in "thoughts".
Marla_Singer said:
However, I still consider French spelling as a lot more a challenge than English spelling.
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French spelling is excruciating, I agree.

But english prononciation... Oh my...
Like I said, it's close to impossible to do any phonetic spelling.
I mean, french prononciation is hard, we have tons of rules, and tons of exceptions.
But english prononciation seems to have no rules, and to be formed entirely of exceptions. Gah.
 
English spelling and French spelling both pale in comparison to Gaelic spelling. In any given Gaelic word, about half the letters are silent.

The pagan holiday Samhain, for example, is a Gaelic word; it's pronunciation is one syllable, and rhymes with "clown".
 
English is a fun language. I have no idea how people learn it as a second language without being completely surrounded by it every day.

I wonder if English is the language where the most typos usually occur..
 
Hitro said:
Words of French origin, including names, are the things I find most problematic in English. Basically because I usually know how they would be pronounced in French but can be quite sure it isn't the same in English, which doesn't make it much easier. Same with things from other romanic languages, particularly Spanish.
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Quite the German, blaming the French. ;)
 
cgannon64 said:
Quite the German, blaming the French. ;)
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No, he's right. What's great in German is that every single letters is pronounced.

What's interesting is that German is tough to learn at the beginning because of all the grammar rules, but once they are assimilated, it's very easy to improve.

On the other side, English is the exact opposite. It's very easy at the beginning because sentences are easy to make... but it's very hard to speak it really correctly because of all the exceptions.

As a result, few people speak German, but when it's the case, they speak it very well... and many people speak English, but most (including me) are doing mistakes all the time.
 
That is exactly how I feel about German and English!
 
cgannon64 said:
Quite the German, blaming the French. ;)
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Actually I was blaming the English. ;)

In this sense I don't have a problem with the French pronounciation itself, the problem is the English pronouciation of originally French words, which goes far beyond an accent. Take a word like "entrepreneur" for example, the English pronounciation of that is neither French nor really English. That is what I mean.
 
Akka said:
French spelling is excruciating, I agree.

But english prononciation... Oh my...
Like I said, it's close to impossible to do any phonetic spelling.
I mean, french prononciation is hard, we have tons of rules, and tons of exceptions.
But english prononciation seems to have no rules, and to be formed entirely of exceptions. Gah.
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Learn Finnish and all your (language) problems will fade away. :D

(I mean, phonetic spelling is very easy and there's almost no exceptions in spelling or pronunciation)
 
You know, anarchy, that Roosevelt tried to change the spelling of some words int he English language. One that he tried to change was "though". He tried to make it tho.
 
Guildenstern said:
English spelling and French spelling both pale in comparison to Gaelic spelling. In any given Gaelic word, about half the letters are silent.

The pagan holiday Samhain, for example, is a Gaelic word; it's pronunciation is one syllable, and rhymes with "clown".
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Isn't it SOW- in? :confused: Regardless, I think I'm just saying it slower than you are. And although some people here doubt the fact I'm Irish :mischief: ; it is best to call the language, in that case, Irish in order to stay away from confusion with the original language of Scotland :p .

Anyway, English is the most entertaining language to speak because of it's variety and size of words, but one of the worst to spell in or conjugate in.

Just look at this conjuagation: "I will have been running". Now take that, throw in contractions and it's I'll've been running. (Atleast spoken it's acceptable). Ugh, I'm glad English is my first language cause it's a bear to learn ;) .
 
Syterion said:
You know, anarchy, that Roosevelt tried to change the spelling of some words int he English language. One that he tried to change was "though". He tried to make it tho.
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Yeah but we threatened to invade America and burn all their dictionaries if he did.
 
Try Russian. Once you've nailed the the 33 letters and learnt the 6 grammatical cases (with few exceptions) it's easy enough to speak and read as words are pronounced phonetically, and words can go anywhere within a sentence.
 
NeoDemocrat said:
Isn't it SOW- in? :confused: Regardless, I think I'm just saying it slower than you are. And although some people here doubt the fact I'm Irish :mischief: ; it is best to call the language, in that case, Irish in order to stay away from confusion with the original language of Scotland :p .

Anyway, English is the most entertaining language to speak because of it's variety and size of words, but one of the worst to spell in or conjugate in.

Just look at this conjuagation: "I will have been running". Now take that, throw in contractions and it's I'll've been running. (Atleast spoken it's acceptable). Ugh, I'm glad English is my first language cause it's a bear to learn ;) .
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If you actually speak Irish Gaelic then I'd wager your pronunciation is correct; I've only read about it.
 
Abulafia said:
Try Russian. Once you've nailed the the 33 letters and learnt the 6 grammatical cases (with few exceptions) it's easy enough to speak and read as words are pronounced phonetically, and words can go anywhere within a sentence.
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Russian is nothing compared to Finnish. Well, OK, Finnish doesn't use 33 letters. But Finnish has 15 grammatical cases:

http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/finnish5.html
 
We took to many words from other langauges, and we have more than one vowel sound per vowel. Plus, there is some overlap in the vowel sounds.
 
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