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Unless they have a father with a PhD in English who acts like an English teacher with them their whole childhood.
I loved my dad, but boy did it suck when I showed him some piece of creative writing I wrote and he got out the red pen.
Fucking English, dumb language held together by tape and desperation.
Most languages don’t need spelling lessons.
Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not ‘un-animous’, it’s ‘you-nanimous’. Makes total sense.
Don’t even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce ‘ough’.English is tough, but it can be understood through thorough thought, though.
I’m learning Swedish slowly, and I was raised in the US south, so I am constantly corrected on pronunciation lol.
Got called out once for pronouncing epitome as Epi-tome.
That one stung more than Camus as Cah-mus instead of Cah-moo. At least thats just the French fucking with us.
It can happen with common words too! Like I didn’t know I was pronouncing Thai food wrong till that John Oliver episode
One of my buddies is in his fifties. He’s been an avid reader his entire life. He pronounces “chasm” with the ch of “chicken” no matter how much we correct him. I’ve known him long enough for that word to actually have shown up in conversation a not-insignificant number of times.
My pet theory is that spoken English and written English are two different languages that kinda translate between them.
In spoken English, “I read books.” doesn’t have ambiguous tense.
Thanks to Hugo’s House of Horrors, a childhood of peh-nuh-lope for Penelope
Names from other languages I think are especially obvious for the self taught or avid reader. Euler, Goethe, Camus, etc
chaos, debris, plumber. I hate the english language.
It is about 15 years ago now but I had to call my ISP for something. Part of the support guys scrips was to ask me if I had an apple or windows machine. I responded that it was a Linux box. To which he told me he wasn’t sure if “their” Internet was compatible with Linux.
I recently moved to a fairly rural area in the midst of them setting up fiber throughout the area. For some reason, the ISP is something like halfway across the country from me. I asked them to setup port forwarding; the first few tech support people I talked to didn’t even know what that is. Eventually they relayed the question to an engineer who was familiar with the concept but still had a lot of irrelevant questions, many of which were about the operating system I used. It was … Frustrating.
I did finally get port forwarding, but it took literally a month and a half, figuratively a million calls, and ten to twenty of their staff over at least three departments. I’m happy now, though.
Edit: sorry about the initially irrelevant and probably boring post. I accidentally pressed post prematurely.
It is even more funny if the reading isn’t in your native language. I can write in English at a C1-C2 level but I am at the B level when speaking as I have no clue how to pronounce most of my regular vocabulary that I use when writing.
They didn’t teach pronunciation when you learned to read English? That’s one of the very first parts of instruction when teaching it to native speakers. That’s also how instruction went when I learned Spanish. Granted, those are both Latin based languages, so I have no idea how it would work for something like Chinese to English.
We learned some general pronunciation rules but that was just for the vocabulary we had to learn for the lessons. The problem is that there are so many exceptions to the rules of pronunciation in English that you have to guess with like every third word if you didn’t hear it before somehow. I mean, look at this
