[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.

[danielheath]

Which one?

[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.