How do you pronounce English?

[Jonnas]

English the easiest? Quite interesting...I don't know how similar Portuguese is to English, but the variation of phonemes you mentioned probably helps here. I'd say Japanese is one of easiest ones, though that's probably just because it's a pretty phonetic language like Finnish...other easy ones include German, Spanish and Swedish.

 

Ah yes, I find English the easiest language overall because it doesn't have the amount of detail in basic expressions that others have. For example, Spanish and Portuguese have many forms per verb (depending on things like tense, person, etc.), while English has considerably less (e.g.: I speak/You speak --> Eu falo/Tu falas). Another thing that's usually difficult to learn for foreigners is the concept of gendered nouns and adjectives, while English lacks this.

Proper phrase conjugation can be tricky, but it's easy to get your point across ("I don't want no trouble" being an example of a badly conjugated phrase that's widely acceptable)

For me, the only hard part of english is the existence of certain words that aren't written as one would expect ("Light" and "Bass" (Instrument) spring to mind)

 

By the way, I was only including languages where I'm fluent/decent when I said that. Japanese does look to be even easier to pronounce than Spanish, but since I don't speak Japanese, I wasn't sure.

Finnish sounds easy to pronounce (a cousin of mine speaks Finnish), though the only words I know are "Jalka" and "Teräsbetoni/Betoni"

I have no idea on German or Swedish, though.

 

Finally, a question: Is RP a guide for proper pronunciation or something? I haven't heard that term before.

[Frank]

You have a good accent, easy to understand. When I first saw the thread I was expecting a massive discussion on tom-ay-to tom-ah-to.

 

[dwarf]

'Ing-lish'.

 

Like that.

[Diageo]

Hey Jonnas, I don't know what you mean by versatile towards Portuguese speaking, but Portugal Portuguese is a lot more closed and like you try to keep your mouth closed while speaking.

While Brazilian Portuguese flows and sounds musical.

So I would say it's much easier to not have an accent if you speak Brazilian Portuguese than with the Portugal equivalent. If that's what you mean by versatile.

[Jonnas]

Hey Jonnas, I don't know what you mean by versatile towards Portuguese speaking, but Portugal Portuguese is a lot more closed and like you try to keep your mouth closed while speaking.

While Brazilian Portuguese flows and sounds musical.

So I would say it's much easier to not have an accent if you speak Brazilian Portuguese than with the Portugal equivalent. If that's what you mean by versatile.

 

Oh yeah, I often forget you're Brazillian.

 

Anyway, what you say about Portugal Portuguese being "closed" and Brazillian Portuguese being musical is true, yes. However, a Portuguese person has an easier time replicating other sounds (hence the less noticeable accent in other languages) while the Brazilians' musical speech is still felt.

Inversely, a foreigner will have an easier time replicating Brazilian Portuguese (as it's more noticeable) than the Portugal Portuguese

 

Of course, I speak only from personal experience.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

 

Sorry for the low volume.

[Ville]

-

Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Eenuh]

I was going to make a video, but then when I started I didin't really know what to say or what to talk about haha.

 

*thinks*

 

 

Edit:

Soooo I made a video in the end. Which turned out a bit crap and doesn't really go anywhere, but oh well. =P

 

I apologise for the weird faces I pull, the redness in my eyes (still from surgery) and the horrible way I talk in haha. I already noticed many many mistakes in what I said in that video, but then again I do the same in Dutch so maybe that's just me being me. =P

 

Edited October 11, 2010 by Eenuh
Automerged Doublepost

[Rummy]

RP is basically Queen's English, right? I know it was generally the taught english in foreign countries(or at least some of the asian/indian countries, it was funny to hear bollywood actors talking english when i was little).

 

I have to say, your english sounds pretty damn good to me, it's far more than enough to get by, and probably better than the english of some of the louts round here. I too, like others, love a good accent, so try not to drop it, although there is a slowness to your speech, but it's better than talking too fast. Personally, I don't even know what my accent is now, sometimes I'm convinced it's not the accent I should have, though. I'll pop back into the thread later and maybe even make a video, but I have to go to work now.

 

Also though, Ine spoke amazing English when I met her(well compared to what I was expecting), her accent wasn't near as thick as I expected it to be.

[Eenuh]

Also though, Ine spoke amazing English when I met her(well compared to what I was expecting), her accent wasn't near as thick as I expected it to be.

 

I actually mention you in my video I think, how you made fun of me. =P

I think I did pretty well that day, considering I didn't sleep and found it hard to concentrate on what was going on. Half of the time I had no clue what people were saying though, especially in the pub.

[Dan_Dare]

Eenuh I love your accent. It rocks.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

You speak English very well, Eenuh! To me it sounded a bit British.

 

Regarding the rolling Rs, I may have been mistaken. I was referring to how the English R differs from the Danish R. The Danish R is, like pretty much everything else in our language, pretty flat. It's somewhere between the English R, which is in the front of the mouth and almost "rolls" off the tip of the tongue, and the Spanish R, which is in the throat.

[jayseven]

http://www.thatwasfunny.com/twenty-one-reasons-why-english-is-hard-to-learn/206

 

I think Eenuh was very right - there's no need to worry about your pronounciations. The above link is proof enough of how the english language can trip people up with the gap between written and spoken word. The english language is not written very phonetically (I'd say the italian language is probably the most phonetical I've encountered), so it is awkward to learn, but! Even I still pronounce things wrong. i could not honestly tell you right now which words they are, but there must be at least a dozen of them and I generally just choose to use another word entirely, instead of looking a fool.

 

I think in general, foreign speakers of english are very careful to enunciate everything correctly while natives rely on context and familiarity and quick vocab memory access. I have a french family friend who is 60, has lived in england for 40 years, yet she still pronounces things 'wrong' - but we don't correct her anymore because we recognise what it is she's trying to say. If I mishear a foreign speaker it is probably because I am not used to that particular pronounciation, just as they may not recognise my accent.

 

Ultimately, I am very jealous of you all! I wish I could speak another language or three.

[Dan_Dare]

Eenuh sounds like a euro cockney at times. <3

[jayseven]

Dannyboy; I think you're too concerned with the pronounciation (Eenuh too, to an extent) - I think you're active in your speaking, both with intonations and hand gestures, and they make for a lively and accurate monologue!

[MoogleViper]

You two have very good (by good I mean close to RP, though I actually prefer a regional accent) accents.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Dannyboy; I think you're too concerned with the pronounciation (Eenuh too, to an extent) - I think you're active in your speaking, both with intonations and hand gestures, and they make for a lively and accurate monologue!

Heh, I realised I use gestures an awful lot when I'm trying to explain something. And thanks! I know I worry too much about speaking "properly". It's interesting that you all prefer accents. In Denmark, having the dreaded Danish accent is often a source of ridicule. Even in school, the aim is to speak either British or American English. Danish English will get you bad grades.

[Eenuh]

In secondary school when learning English, we had someone who seemed to speak with a very Scottish accent... though not on purpose. It was quite funny, but the poor kid couldn't help it and kept getting scolded by the teacher for speaking that way. =P

 

But yeah, they try to teach us British English in schools, though I imagine a lot of kids pick up more from television than they do from what they teach in classes. I think I'm one of the few who actually paid attention during English lessons haha.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

It's the same with me. The "censor" (can't find the proper English for it at the moment) at my English exam noted that my accent was British whereas most of my fellow students had an American accent. It would seem I'm more exposed to British English than American English. I place the responsibility on you lot.

[Supergrunch]

First off, as has been implicit both in your post and some of the responses, there's a distinction between a foreign accent and a native dialect which should always be made, as native speakers already speak a genuine variety of English whereas those learning English as non-native speakers will be trying to approximate to one or more native accents in their speech. That said, as people like Fish have pointed out, it's best not to try and sound exactly like a particular type of native speaker, and instead retain some of your accent. This is because all languages and dialects are sufficiently complex that anyone who isn't brought up speaking them will practically never reach a stage where they're indistinguishable from a native speaker – indeed, it's been suggested that one of the functions of language and dialect is to allow people to identify others as coming from a particular group or area, and this is why it's so impossible for outsiders to perfectly learn. Furthermore, being a native speaker of a language generally suggests that you also carry a good deal of cultural knowledge, that, as a foreigner, you may well not have – for instance, I might ask a native English speaker I'd just met about something like children's TV we're likely both to have seen, but if the speaker had a foreign accent, I'd know to avoid topics of conversation like this. So as long as you can be clearly understood, it's best and in fact unavoidable to retain some kind of accent, especially in terms of phonetics and phonology.

 

Moving on then – you talk about the differences between Finnish and English stress, which as you note work very differently. Firstly, as you identified, English stress is used extensively to indicate what linguists call information structure – a good example of this is how stress can be used to mark the topic of the sentence. For instance, let's consider one sentence but put the stress in different places:

 

He gave the money to John. (Him rather than someone else)

He gave the money to John. (Given as opposed to some other action being taken)

He gave the money to John. (Not just any money but some money previously identified in the discourse)

He gave the money to John. (Money rather than anything else that was given)

He gave the money to John. (Given specifically to John rather than anything else e.g. “via John”)

He gave the money to John. (John rather than anyone else)

 

On the left of these sentences is how a native speaker would interpret the stress assignment – as far as I know, Finnish doesn't exhibit this kind of phenomenon. In addition to this kind of stress, the basic stress systems of the two languages also differs quite a lot – Finnish has one of the simplest stress systems in the world, with stress always falling on the first syllable of a word. English, by contrast, has perhaps the most complex stress systems of any language, and there seem to be all sorts of rules governing the assignment of stress to words, and nobody has managed to fully define them so far. As an example, the formation of some words can cause the location of stresses to change - “compare” has primary stress on the second syllable, but “comparable” has primary stress on the first.

 

There's another necessary distinction that you didn't make as much, which is that written language is a very different thing to spoken language. Indeed, while the latter of these develops naturally and seems to be an aspect of some kind of evolution, whether cultural or biological, the former is very much a conscious (albeit probably gradual) invention of humans, and has to be taught to people or they won't learn it. So linguists think of spoken language as primary, with the written form being only a flawed representation of this, and so there can be an awful lot of mismatch between the written and spoken form. Written English is actually a very good example of this, as our spelling system is rather counter-intuitive, with lots of remnants of Middle English pronunciation. For instance, look at the following lines from Chaucer.

 

And smale foweles maken melodye / That slepen al the night with open eye

 

It doesn't take very much to correct this to modern spelling, though of course the syntax looks a little odd:

 

And small fowls make melody / that sleep all the night with open eye

 

If we compare how these are pronounced, however, the difference is far greater. Here's my inexpert rendition of the first, and my native speaker rendition of the second. Note that the Middle English is far closer to the actual spelling, – the “e”s at the end of words are often pronounced, as is every letter of “night.” Furthermore the vowels are much more like those of other European languages. These massive changes in pronunciation without corresponding changes in the writing system are in part a result of the Great Vowel Shift, which led to lots of English vowels being pronounced very differently, and one of the knock-on effects of this was that final “e”s in words began to indicate differences in vowels rather than new syllables – compare for instance the English pronunciation of “mak” as opposed to “make.” So when you say that in Finnish every letter is pronounced, what you really mean is that the Finnish writing system corresponds more closely to modern spoken Finnish than the English system does – in fact, you even split your English rendition of “there” into two syllables, when it only has one – the “e” just tells us what type of vowel the word has. You also seem to pronounce the “r” at the end a little here – this pronunciation of syllable-final “r”s known as rhotacism, and is present in certain dialects of English, especially in Ireland and America, although some varieties on the UK mainland also use it. Interestingly, neither RP nor your accent appear to – while you use it when pronouncing “there” slowly, none of your other words seem to exhibit this property.

 

Anyway, having said all that, it's now time to reveal that I'm actually an RP speaker myself. Here's an example of my accent, reading a text commonly used by phoneticians.

Finally, a question: Is RP a guide for proper pronunciation or something? I haven't heard that term before.

RP is basically Queen's English, right? I know it was generally the taught english in foreign countries(or at least some of the asian/indian countries, it was funny to hear bollywood actors talking english when i was little).

RP (received pronunciation) is a dialect of English spoken in the south-east of the country that is often considered to be “standard” English – it's the prototypical accent people tend to think of when thinking of British English, and in the past the BBC always picked newsreaders and so on who spoke RP. I've heard that the term originates because it allowed people to be received in court, as apparently lawyers weren't fans of regional accents. It's pretty much the same thing as the Queen's English, but this term is a bit more confusing as firstly the Queen doesn't really speak RP, and secondly the her accent has changed over time. Plus it's a bit more of a loaded term.

Also, would be nice to hear about the status of RP in the UK, since it's basically THE variant taught to foreign people at least in Europe.

So yes, as people have pointed out, RP is considered to be “posh.” This used to mean it was desirable to speak, and highly sort after, with many trying to alter their native accents so they sounded more like RP speakers, but in recent years it's started to get less popular. This is because of a phenomenon known as covert prestige (where people take pride in speaking varieties of English that are considered to be less posh) has recently become a lot stronger in England, perhaps because of various cultural changes such as the increase in multiculturalism and the greater proportion of left wing views. So for whatever reason, regional dialects are in fashion, and now chosen over RP speakers for jobs such as TV announcing (the Big Brother narrator guy is a good example of this), which is nice for linguists as we get to hear a lot more dialects. If anything, RP is looked down upon more these days because of its “posh” associations, although it's of course prided in certain circles. I personally would like to speak a dialect other than RP, if only people RP is much better studied than other dialects and so a bit more boring from a linguistic perspective. Either way, it often seems to be tradition that RP is used when English is being taught as a second language, presumably because it's (outdatedly?) thought of as “standard” English. Increasingly, however, American English is being taught instead, which makes quite a lot of sense even if British English speakers don't like it much.

I've an awful accent and there will be no uploadage... :P

Do upload it! There's no such thing as an awful accent if you're a native speaker, and I'm sure if yours is as diverse as you say it will be interesting.

The good thing about the Portuguese language is that it doesn't leave a strong accent. Once we learn how another language is properly pronounced, we can do it more easily than, say, a Spanish, French or English speaker.

Ah yes, I find English the easiest language overall because it doesn't have the amount of detail in basic expressions that others have. For example, Spanish and Portuguese have many forms per verb (depending on things like tense, person, etc.), while English has considerably less (e.g.: I speak/You speak --> Eu falo/Tu falas). Another thing that's usually difficult to learn for foreigners is the concept of gendered nouns and adjectives, while English lacks this.

Proper phrase conjugation can be tricky, but it's easy to get your point across ("I don't want no trouble" being an example of a badly conjugated phrase that's widely acceptable)

For me, the only hard part of english is the existence of certain words that aren't written as one would expect ("Light" and "Bass" (Instrument) spring to mind)

 

By the way, I was only including languages where I'm fluent/decent when I said that. Japanese does look to be even easier to pronounce than Spanish, but since I don't speak Japanese, I wasn't sure.

Finnish sounds easy to pronounce (a cousin of mine speaks Finnish), though the only words I know are "Jalka" and "Teräsbetoni/Betoni"

I have no idea on German or Swedish, though.

All these considerations of easiness really depend on the native language of the second language learner. As you correctly note, English inflection is very easy to a native Portuguese speaker as it's far simpler, but Finnish has even more inflection than Portuguese, so this aspect of Finnish would seem hard even to a Portuguese speaker (and even more so for an English speaker!). Furthermore, while you might find that some languages are more similar to Portuguese in their phonology, meaning you don't have as much of an accent, others will be much harder. For instance, Mandarin Chinese would be much easier to pronounce for a Vietnamese speaker than for a Portuguese speaker, as both Vietnamese and Mandarin are tonal, whereas Portuguese isn't. The only aspect of English that's objectively more difficult than most (but definitely not all!) other languages is the writing system, but as I've covered above, learning to write a language isn't the same as learning (to speak) a language. And I'm not sure what you mean by “badly conjugated” – phrases like “I don't want no trouble” (meaning “I don't want trouble”) are indeed ungrammatical in many varieties of English including RP (though the sentence is fine in RP if the meaning is “I do want some trouble”), but this is nothing to do with conjugation. It's because RP doesn't allow what's known as negative concord – multiple negations cancel each other out instead of just leading to an overall negative. By contrast, many other English dialects do allow negative concord, hence phrases like your example, and in French, even simple negation requires two negatives - “ne” and “pas.”

'Ing-lish'.

 

Like that.

You mean /ˈɪŋ lɪʃ/, right? ;D

You're both wrong, it's ing-glish or /'ɪŋ.glɪʃ/, unless you're American in which case the /g/ is optional.

A couple of things here. The first is that language prettiness is very much a subjective and culturally shaped thing – while there are certain sounds like gutturals that are fairly universally thought of as ugly (except by speakers of languages that use them ), most judgements of prettiness tend to be decided for sociological reasons. For instance, native Greek speakers tend to prefer the more prestigious Athenian dialect to the Cretan one, whereas when English speakers who don't speak Greek and are unaware of the relative prestiges are given the same choice, they tend to prefer sound of the Cretan dialect, even when the choice is blind. So interestingly prettiness is very subjective, but of course that shouldn't stop you talking about it.

 

You also spoke about Japanese not appearing to have stress. While it does use stress a little to mark things in discourse and so on, this is far less extensive than in English, and the actual structure of the language is based on timing units known as mora, whereas English by contrast is timed with stresses. French is similar to Japanese in this respect, only timed with syllables rather than mora (people have actually suggested that Indian English is also stress-timed, although this is debated). Anyway, if we look at a simple Japanese sentence, we can clearly divide it up into mora units, which roughly correspond to single hiragana and katakana characters:

 

ringo ga dai suki

 

ri N go ga da i su ki

 

Each mora is given similar stress, and the language is timed to these units. Note that moras are not the same as syllables, as “rin” is a syllable yet is comprised of two mora – it's for this reason that Japanese N is sometimes referred to as the mora nasal.

 

By contrast, the same sentence in English is very different:

 

I LOVE APples.

 

Each stressed syllable, rather than each syllable (French) or each mora (Japanese) acts as a timing unit. Danish is also stress-timed.

Regarding the rolling Rs, I may have been mistaken. I was referring to how the English R differs from the Danish R. The R is, like pretty much everything else in our language, pretty flat. It's somewhere between the English R, which is in the front of the mouth and almost "rolls" off the tip of the tongue, and the Spanish R, which is in the throat.

Yeah, English doesn't have any rolled Rs. The standard English R is what's known as an alveolar approximant, meaning it's produced by bringing the tongue close to the ridge above the gum (the alveolar ridge) while vibrating the larynx (voicing). Spanish R, however, isn't produced in the throat either – Spanish has two Rs, as in “pero” (but) and “perro” (dog). The first of these is an alveolar flap, produced by quickly tapping the tongue on the alveolar ridge while voicing, while the second is an alveolar trill, produced by vibrating the tongue on the alveolar ridge while voicing. You may be thinking of the French R, which is a uvular trill – like the aveolar trill only done with the uvulum, the dangly bit at the back of your throat. The Danish R is a uvular fricative, so close to the French R, only air is forced through a small gap instead of vibrations being produced, as with sounds like S.

The english language is not written very phonetically (I'd say the italian language is probably the most phonetical I've encountered), so it is awkward to learn, but! Even I still pronounce things wrong.

Well, writing systems like those of English and Italian actually correspond to phonemes rather than phonetic reality, as contextual variants of the same phoneme (allophones) are never represented – for instance, the L in “pill” and “lip” is a different sound or phone, but the same phoneme. In fact the only phonetic writing systems are those designed by phoneticians, presumably because the brain doesn't store representations at the phonetic level. But yeah, Italian is one of the most phonemically accurate non-scientific writing systems there is.

 

And Eenuh, your accent sounds amazing. A bit like other Dutch-speaking Belgian's I know, but with more of a cockney twang (which is more common for speakers of Slavic languages).

 

Edit: If people know of something better than Rapidshare for uploading little mp3s, let me know about it and I'll reupload my files.

[Raining_again]

Ine your accent is lovely... You people make us look bad god dammit =P

 

And your eyes look sore!!

[Ville]

-

Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Ashley]

Eenuh sounds like a euro cockney at times. <3

 

[ignores rest of thread as Jim just sent me in here to show off his girlfriend]

 

I was going to say she sounds like a yank trying to play a Brit. But I love it

 

Although : rolling 'r'. Rrrrr indeed

 

(and Jim is st00pid!)

Edited October 11, 2010 by Ashley

[Jonnas]

 

All these considerations of easiness really depend on the native language of the second language learner. As you correctly note, English inflection is very easy to a native Portuguese speaker as it's far simpler, but Finnish has even more inflection than Portuguese, so this aspect of Finnish would seem hard even to a Portuguese speaker (and even more so for an English speaker!). Furthermore, while you might find that some languages are more similar to Portuguese in their phonology, meaning you don't have as much of an accent, others will be much harder. For instance, Mandarin Chinese would be much easier to pronounce for a Vietnamese speaker than for a Portuguese speaker, as both Vietnamese and Mandarin are tonal, whereas Portuguese isn't. The only aspect of English that's objectively more difficult than most (but definitely not all!) other languages is the writing system, but as I've covered above, learning to write a language isn't the same as learning (to speak) a language. And I'm not sure what you mean by “badly conjugated†– phrases like “I don't want no trouble†(meaning “I don't want troubleâ€) are indeed ungrammatical in many varieties of English including RP (though the sentence is fine in RP if the meaning is “I do want some troubleâ€), but this is nothing to do with conjugation. It's because RP doesn't allow what's known as negative concord – multiple negations cancel each other out instead of just leading to an overall negative. By contrast, many other English dialects do allow negative concord, hence phrases like your example, and in French, even simple negation requires two negatives - “ne†and “pas.â€

 

-Regarding the "easiness of languages", yes I am biased towards a side depending on my language, I suppose. Thinking about things a little better, Spanish probably is easier than English overall (except for the gendered nouns), but since English is so widespread, many people are already used to at least hearing it regularly;

 

-The "badly conjugated phrases" was just a mistake I made. The correct term is probably "phrasal construction" or something like that. Basically, figuring out how to structure a phrase properly. I am aware this is an issue for every language, but I find English speakers to be more versatile and permissive in this regard (for the example I gave above, the correct form would be "I don't want any trouble". According to RP, it means the opposite, but anyone hearing the phrase knows what the speaker meant).

Basically, I feel like in other languages, it's not as ambiguous. If the negative and double negative mean the same thing, that is also a pre-existing grammar rule. But if you deviate from the norm, you won't figure out the original meaning of the statement as easily you would in English. Or at least that's how I feel;

 

Yeah, English doesn't have any rolled Rs. The standard English R is what's known as an alveolar approximant, meaning it's produced by bringing the tongue close to the ridge above the gum (the alveolar ridge) while vibrating the larynx (voicing). Spanish R, however, isn't produced in the throat either – Spanish has two Rs, as in “pero†(but) and “perro†(dog). The first of these is an alveolar flap, produced by quickly tapping the tongue on the alveolar ridge while voicing, while the second is an alveolar trill, produced by vibrating the tongue on the alveolar ridge while voicing. You may be thinking of the French R, which is a uvular trill – like the aveolar trill only done with the uvulum, the dangly bit at the back of your throat. The Danish R is a uvular fricative, so close to the French R, only air is forced through a small gap instead of vibrations being produced, as with sounds like S.

 

So, "alveolar approximant" for the "English R", "alveolar flap" for the "soft R" used in Portuguese and Spanish, "alveolar trill" for the Spanish "hard R" and "uvular trill" for the "French R".

I didn't know their proper names, thank you It's amusing how the Portuguese can use the alveolar trill or the uvular trill interchangeably.

 

The "uvular fricative" you mentioned...Is it the same as the one used in German? Or is that a different one? (Just out of curiosity, as I plan to learn German at some point, anyway)

[Eenuh]

Haha thanks for all the compliments on my accent guys! And I'll assume a Cockney accent is nothing bad, right? =P

 

Ine your accent is lovely... You people make us look bad god dammit =P

 

And your eyes look sore!!

 

Ah I think the video makes my eyes look worse than they are... maybe. They're not really sore any more though luckily. =)

 

[ignores rest of thread as Jim just sent me in here to show off his girlfriend]

 

I was going to say she sounds like a yank trying to play a Brit. But I love it

 

Although : rolling 'r'. Rrrrr indeed

 

(and Jim is st00pid!)

 

Haha I'm not trying to play as anyone, I just pick up different accents everywhere I think. Also, with my rolling r I can imitate a purring cat. You just have to admit that's sexy. Somehow. =P

 

 

And yeah Jim is stupid indeed! I feel used that he sends people in here to comment on me!