Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Pains of English Pronunciation

English pronunciation is really difficult and sometimes beyond comprehension; take this first example:


Ghoti= fish. Click here if you don´t believe me as for its meaning and here to check its pronunciation

Sometimes making yourself understood, even in relation to the most basic sounds of the English language, can turn out to be a pretty hard task. Watch this clip from the television game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?." This show offers large amounts of money as prizes if you answer correctly a series of multiple-choice questions; in this case, the contestant faces big problems when trying to word his answer: something as simple as saying  the first letter of the English alphabet.



And accents...well, that´s another story. Understanding people with, let´s say, a strong (or not so strong) Scottish accent is difficult for most native-English speakers from other English speaking countries -and for some voice-recognition technology in elevators, for that matter...




11 comments:

  1. Hi Rosa:

    It's a very fun entry. Google doesn't know how to pronounce ghoti.
    ¡And then the people say the English is an easy language!
    Jajaja...

    I wish you a Happy New Year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, "Erelea". Happy 2012 to you too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lucía Villaravid14 January, 2012

    This post remembers me my swedish adventure and the expressions of the people who didn´t understand me,I made them laugh a lot repeating what I said so slowly and including my own mixes between spanish and english hahaha.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lucía, I hope you wrote a journal during your stay in Sweden so as not to forget all those funny anecdotes

    ReplyDelete
  5. claudia rozas sanz15 January, 2012

    The video of, who wants to be a millionaire? it´s very funny for people who watch the video but for the contestant no, because he wanted the money. sometimes in the real life happens if people don´t expressed well, but in this video was a joke that the programme did for the contestant.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Claudia, I agree with you, it´s important to be able to express yourself well in real life but these misunderstandings are funny when you are not involved in them

    ReplyDelete
  7. María Maseda Varela15 January, 2012

    I find these videos really funny. I think English is like Spanish because it has diffent accents and different words according to the place where it is spoken. I prefer American accent beacause, for me, it is easier to undestand. I haven seen some American films in original version and they are easier to understand than the Brithish beacause British accent is closer.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I am glad you enjoyed them, María.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Catalina Román Máiz21 January, 2012

    Hi Rosa!I think that Scottish accent is a bit difficult from English speakers because they talk very low and Scottish people has an accent more high. For example, in Galicia there are areas with different accents. I hope that don't put an elevator with voice recognition in my house.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Catalina, I agree; I doubt a device like this would work in many areas in Spain.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Julia, I hope your link will be useful. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...