English Pronunciation Challenges
Discussions center on the difficulties of English pronunciation due to irregular spelling, homophones, multiple vowel sounds, and lack of phonetic consistency, often compared to more phonetic languages like Farsi, Spanish, or tonal languages.
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Similar to English and other less-than-perfect phonetic languages? Or worse?
Well explained. Does the similar pronunciation and many homophones cause any issues when spoken?
Definitely. One big pain point when learning English is phonetics, specifically the 12-15 vowels, and how frequently I fail predicting how a word is pronounced from the spelling. One has to be prepared to spend a lot of time learning _two_ language vocabularies: written and spoken. This is not true of most European languages (you can exactly know how a word is pronounced from the spelling).
Seems the answer is to learn International Phonetic Alphabet.
Idea: Farsi and Russian both have simple list of vowel sounds and no diphtongs. Making it hard/obvious when attempting to speak english, which is rife with them and many different vowel sounds
Grammar hasn't. Pronunciation has, a lot.
I think English monolingual people have a harder time learning and distinguishing homophones (words with same pronunciation but different spelling) - such as to/too/two, there/their/they're, its/it's, etc. If you know another language and correspond the aforementioned English words with those in the other language, you can see that they become quite distinct. For example, to/too/two in French is à/aussi/deux.
It's a tonal language, which enables multiple use of a single letter/tone. Evidently English speakers have trouble detecting proper tone..
I would say that an exact, unambiguous phonetic writing (like in Spanish, Korean, Japanese kana, Mongol in Cyrillic mode, etc) would help flatten the pronunciation differences.
Words being the same makes it harder to parse, but easier to speak/write...