this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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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
There are quite a lot of exceptions. When I was learning Japanese I discovered that there are something like 2300 different English words that use irregular vowel sounds, and the number for Japanese words was something like 4. It has been 15 years, so I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was crazy.
Yeah, English and rules. They don't mix.
That's because English isn't a language. It's three languages wearing a trenchcoat.
Probably depends on how much formal education you had and how much is from reading books and stuff on the Internet. The Problem with English pronunciation is, that it's completely arbitrary, depending from which language the word is originally. I don't know about Spanish but in French you can usually derive a words pronunciation from it's spelling and vice versa.
I think same goes for every sane language
French is also a proscriptive language. There is a governing body that decides which words are "French" and how they should be pronounced.
English is a descriptive language. Words can be borrowed from other languages, and the only "rule" is common usage. If you speak and you are understood, then that's all that matters. There is no authority or governing body, as much as dictionaries like Oxford, Merriam, and Webster try to pretend to be. That can cause word pronunciations to change over time. There's actually an interesting phenomenon where English words will be "mis"-pronounced because people make up non-existent rules, and if enough people believe it, then the pronunciation becomes correct through popular usage.
Take the word "forte" meaning a personal strength or expertise. It is a word English borrowed from French, and many UK English speakers use the original French pronunciation, which sounds almost exactly like "fort." American English speakers, seeing the word written and thinking it didn't sound French enough, mispronounced the word as "FORtay" and this has become the accepted pronunciation in the USA. Further confusion stems from homonym used in music "forte" which is pronounced "forTEH" because it is the Italian word for "strong" meaning loud or forceful. Linguists sometimes also argue that the US pronunciation caught on because it clearly differentiated the word from the word "fort" meaning a military encampment.
The point is, English has no rules. To quote James D. Nicoll, "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Yeah, I realized after asking that it's kind of a dumb question, considering I'm a native speaker and I was just writing about how I've mispronounced a bunch of words for most of my life that I've only ever read.
In Spanish, you can derive a word's pronunciation from its spelling, but not the other way around, due to letters such as b, v, h, ll and y, some of which are interchangeable or mute.
They do teach pronunciation in ESL courses, but there is so much nuance to any language that I think most people need some degree of exposure to native speakers to be able to pick up on all of the subtlety that they have had the benefit of hearing from birth. I took years of Spanish myself but my verbal skills never developed nearly as far as my ability to read and write because I didn't take the opportunity to put them into practice.
That makes sense. I can read Spanish pretty well, and I can understand Spanish when it is spoken by a non-native speaker, but when I hear native speakers it turns into a jumble of sounds I can't make sense of. I also struggle with the different sentence structure, and the non English sounds, like the rolled R. Basically I can only speak and understand Spanglish and restaurant Spanish.