[JaakkoP]

I'm a non-native English speaker, and I've been working with an accent coach to improve my pronunciation. The IPA chart has been instrumental teaching tool, and after about two years it's finally starting to sink in.

It's really helpful to understand the theory behind the pronunciation, instead of just repeating words and attempt to make the same sounds as my coach. As in "this is what your tongue should be doing, but you're doing this other thing instead."

You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong. For example, there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English. It's just something that never crossed my mind before starting to work with a professional.

[dvirsky]

I'm a native Hebrew speaker. We basically have one way to say each vowel. It took practice for me (not with a coach but with some training videos etc) to even hear the different ways English speakers pronounce them, my brain just wasn't tuned to hear them, let alone pronounce them.

Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity - sheet/shit, peace/piece/piss.

[shazar]

Aren't week/weak and piece/peace pronounced exactly the same?

[ericbarrett]

I'd pronounce those the same (western US accent), but it can vary. Check out the caught/cot merger, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger

[irrational]

They are for me. Exactly the same pronunciation and emphasis. Maybe there are some dialects of English where they are not pronounced the same.

[3pt14159]

They're really quite close, both pairs of them. But the emphasis isn't quite the same as most people speak it.

[NovemberWhiskey]

As a speaker of fairly standard British English, I would say they are homophones; I tried but couldn't find any natural way in which I could pronounce them differently.

[shazar]

dictionary.com shows both with the same IPA: \wik\ and \pis\.

[ff7c11]

I think they're identical.

[danielheath]

I’m sure, in many accents, that they are. Definitely not the same in Australian Strine.

[hunter2_]

As an American, I knew about Straya but this is the first I've heard of Strine. Or should I say Murican :)

[no_carrier]

They're identical in Australian English.

[leephillips]

They are identical. I think he was making a distinction between {week, weak} on one hand and {wick} on the other (but I was also initially confused by the way he put it). This is a big hurdle for native Spanish speakers as well, because i in Spanish is always pronounced as "ee". There seem to be a lot of embarrassing word pairs around these vowels; sheet, beach, etc.

[dvirsky]

Yeah what I meant is that it just increases the possibilities of awkwardness. Piss of cake, piss process, etc.

[chrisweekly]

Yes, they're homophones.

[ff7c11]

French speakers often struggle with beach/bitch :)

[alfonsodev]

As Spanish speaker I struggled myself with that one, sweating, and probably over correcting making the e super long beeeeach to be safe. :D

[desert_boi]

In German, the vowels between schwül and schwul were really difficult to do for me as an American English speaker. I couldn't ever hear the difference between rounded and unrounded vowels. American English vowels are only rounded in the back. u and o (and in the East the au in caught).

[pmontra]

Italian speaker: also piece / peace / piss and sheet / shit.

We have only seven vowel sounds. A i u and open / closed e o. But different parts of the country often use only one of the two e and o sounds.

[blowski]

There's also the classic can't, count, and cunt (the last being one of the most offensive expletives).

[dvirsky]

For me that actually was easier - learning English mostly from TV as a kid I just pronounced can't as "kent".

[cortesoft]

As a native Californian, I pronounce week and weak the same. Not sure about other places.

[3pt14159]

Peace and piece are really quite close. Even week and weak are too. At least to my Canadian, native English ears; and I've done enough French, Russian, and Greek to hear the difference between what other Canadian English speakers would consider to be the same sound.

[gizmo686]

I had this realization during one of my later linguistics classes. It was a syntax class, so didn't really have anything to do with pronunciation; but it was an upper level class, so it was a safe assumption that everyone knew IPA.

In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times). Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty.

(For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)

[StavrosK]

Can you post his name? I don't understand how it would be so hard to hear, hopefully he wouldn't mind.

[gizmo686]

Gesoel /ʒɛʒuɛl/

(Going off of memory here, I probably butchered the pronunciation anyway).

/ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English, and for whatever reason it was incredibly hard for me to perceive it there.

There was probably other more subtle differences between the two that did not make it into the transcription (e.g., his native name was pronounced with his native accent instead of his English accent)

[StavrosK]

Oh aha, that's very interesting thanks! It's amazing how hard it is to parse things that you aren't primed for. I sometimes don't even recognize my native language for a while if I'm in an English-speaking country and hear it out of the blue without context.

[gizmo686]

I'm giving up my search for it, but I once read a research paper on categorical perception.

If you compare [ta] and [da], you find that the only difference is the time between when you make the consonant, and when your vocal chords start vibrating (voice onset time). In theory, VOT is a contimum, with any value being possible. However, in English it forms a tri-modal distribution /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/. The experiment artificially edited a sound to vary between /t/ and /d/, including with VOTs between the two that do not occur in English. What they found is that people put all of the sounds in 2 boxes, and were unable to distinguish between sounds in the same box, even if their VOT varied considerably.

However, when test subjects were played the same sounds, but told they were listening to rain drops, this effect disapeared, and they were able to distinguish between sounds in the same box.

[StavrosK]

Hmm, very interesting, thank you! Is it this one?

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.103...

Seems to be exactly what you describe.

[pdevr]

>/ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English

Doesn't gendarme start with /ʒ/? Adopted word from French, but almost all words have origins somewhere else.

[hunter2_]

> /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English

I never noticed that until now. While it's obviously not an English word, plenty of English speakers have discussed French explorer Jacques Cousteau. I can't think of any other examples.

[open0]

"genre" is one of the few.

One of the languages I know allows for a word-initial /ŋ/, which English does not have at all.

[eythian]

New Zealand English (through Māori influence) has this, in names like Ngaire and places like Ngaio. This said, a lot (perhaps most, though it'll be regional I expect) of speakers will pronounce it as though the 'g' isn't present.

[hunter2_]

Ah, good call.

Vietnamese, by chance? I'm guessing that because the only initial /ŋ/ word on my radar is the name Nguyen.

[FreeFull]

Jean Luc Picard is a well-known name from fiction, too.

[marton78]

... and it bothers me a lot how it's consistently mispronounced as John-Luc in the eponymous series.

[bjackman]

I was once in a classroom in India attempting to teach English to Hindi speaking kids (I don't speak Hindi, but at that time I more or less knew the devanagari script). Someone told me a Hindi word and I wanted to write it on the blackboard in an example.

There are (at least) 3 different consonants in Hindi that just sound like "T" to me. So it took me 3 attempts to spell this Hindi word correctly. The kids all absolutely lost their minds with laughter at this - they were all yelling (what I heard as) "no not tuh, TUH" and just couldn't understand why I couldn't tell the difference.

[rahimnathwani]

The same happens with foreigners learning Mandarin Chinese. The consonants are easy, but each vowel can be pronounced with one of 4 different tones (or 5 if you count the 'neutral' tone).

If you get a tone wrong, sometimes people will understand the erroneous word due to surrounding context. But pretty often you'll just elicit a blank stare. This is especially the case for short phrases, e.g. when you're asking for directions.

[chalcolithic]

>The consonants are easy

I wish. My teachers have no problem telling apart my j and q, but I rarely hear the difference despite all the cosonants in my native language coming in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs.

[rahimnathwani]

I forgot that English speakers often have difficulty with these pairs of consonant sounds in Mandarin:

j / zh

q / ch (the former is further forward in the mouth than 'ch' in English, and the latter further back, with a fully clenched mouth)

[jdmichal]

Wikipedia has a large number of "Help:IPA/<lang>" articles that I refer to a lot. Here's the English one, with its abundance of vowels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English

[rootbear]

This chart is awesome. I agree about understanding the theory. My best friend is Hungarian and I could not get the 'gy' sound in his name (Gyuri) right until I read up on just how it's articulated. I read up on Finnish before I visited there a few years ago and it seemed a lot easier, although I'm not sure I understand the 'o' vowel correctly.

[euroderf]

Finnish 'o' is familiar enough, perhaps you mean 'ö' ?

[davidw]

May I ask which coach you are working with? My wife is interested in one of those services. Thanks!

[JaakkoP]

Let me ask my coach if she's taking new clients at the moment and I'll get back to you. You can reach me at {HN Username}[e-mail]

[DavidSJ]

I found Fluent Forever's minimal pair Anki training decks to be extremely helpful for my German listening and pronunciation. I'm native to American English, and I've been told by multiple native German speakers that my accent is a 2 in strength on a scale of 1 to 10.

https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...

[blowski]

> You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong

There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.

[esolyt]

> there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English

What are those four ways?