[yhager]

There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood.

There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, even though it is clear that English is their second (or third) language. I believe the hardest part is to learn how to make sounds that do not exist in your native language (both consonants and vowels). But the good news is that there are ways to learn that. The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.

The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound. So trying to make the sounds out of the letters will always be a frustrating endeavor, as there will never be a single rule you can follow.

[hfhdjdks]

>English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Spanish does have a regulatory agency (RAE) that we choose to follow, but AFAIK, they don't say anything about pronunciation. Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Colombia all have different pronunciations and not one is more official than the other. There's a certain sense of what's "normal" or nearer the center of gravity for most speakers, but I think that's true for English too (new zealand or south african English is less "standard" than a Midwestern accent or BBC English)

[pif]

> The English spelling is guided by meaning

As a native Italian, I'm convinced that using the Latin alphabet without embracing phonetic spelling can only be driven by idiocy ;-)

[butokai]

And that's why the Italian alphabet comprises tʃ, dʒ, ɲ, ŋ: so that no letter is ever associated with two different phonemes!

[pif]

You are partially right in that Italian is not perfectly phonetic, but it's in such a different league from English that (100% - Italian) is a rounding error with respect to (sanity -English) ;-)

Still, Italian is still perfectly phonetic in writing: can you imagine never having to ask how to spell a town name, or a family name? Can you imagine a word where spelling bees do not exist because they could make no sense? If you hear it, you can spell it.

By the way, your example of "tʃ, dʒ" is spot on, as in you cannot guess how a Z character is to be read, but in practice very few people ever notice. Concerning "ŋ", I think only Italian linguists know about it as a separate phoneme.

You are wrong, instead, about "ɲ": "gn" is always pronounced as in "gnocchi".

[shiroiuma]

>The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.

This is only partially true: the language a person speaks affects the development of facial muscles used to make those sounds. So trying to speak a different language that uses different muscles can be very difficult. Of course, as you said, it's a matter of practice: with enough practice, you can develop those muscles, just like pumping weights in a gym.

[anadalakra]

This is 100% correct. Muscles that aren't used in your mouth/articulators (because your native language doesn't require them) atrophy over time. It is possible to strengthen these muscles with isolated practice -- on BoldVoice we have coach videos where they give you "reps" of muscle movements (such as 20 tongue-ups). We call it "a gym for your mouth" :D It's hard work, but it's the best way to get results.

[degrews]

> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Oh come on. The fact that there is no regulatory body doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about "English pronunciation" in a general way. And Spanish and German have different dialects , accents and pronunciations too.

> The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound

How is the spelling guided by meaning?

[bongobingo1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...

I had no idea this would exist. I guess it makes sense that people would try to do something like this, but also, to my English addled brain, not much sense to expend the effort.

[yhager]

Oh, it's a huge effort! These bodies meet and discuss what the proper spelling of words should be, or they make up new words, and then they publish those guidelines for journalists, authors, and anyone who wants to speak "properly" to follow.

It gives the language a good balance between spelling and pronouncing - that's why you can pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written (I think there are very very few exceptions, if at all). But this comes at a price of losing ability to track meaning some times.

Sometimes it is not going so well, for example, look at the tumultuous German reform of 1996.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...

[filoleg]

I don’t think that the existence of those bodies is the reason for being able to pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written.

Afaik there is no such regulatory body for Russian language, and yet as long as you know the alphabet, you should be able to pronounce almost every single word correctly (even if you have never seen or heard it before).

There are a few exceptions, but I cannot even recall them right now, aside from super common ones that make natural sense. Example: “что” aka “chto”, with “ch” being pronounced more like “sh” (which would naturally end up happening if you try pronouncing it as written aka “chto” a few times).

[mgaunard]

Most of these are just pretending to have any authority.

In particular for French, l'Académie Française is pretty much a joke, with mostly ecclesiastics above 80 years old, no linguists involved, and nothing produced in the last 50 years.

[vibragiel]

It's pretty much the same for the Spanish language.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

Practice and willingness to fail and clown around is key. As an english teacher I've always liked to bring up cross-lingual interference - you're always going to accidentally bring in sounds from your own language into the one you're learning.

I'm no linguist, but English has also drawn a lot from other neighboring languages. Understanding a bit of French, Dutch or German helps a lot with understanding which English words are pronounced in which way. It's not random is what I mean.

I once knew a EU parlament translator and linguist with 6+ languages under his belt. When he visited us in Poland he would not shut up - he tried reading every sign, every word, kept asking how it's pronounced. Just continuously played with language, like a software developer does with code. When he was leaving after a two day stay he had a lot of Polish quite well figured out, it was really impressive. But he was just really willing to fail over and over and over in all social interactions.

[dgroshev]

The set of meaningful sounds (phonemes) is pretty conservative though. They can be rendered very differently (and that's what we call "accent" in native speakers), but it's like moving a densely connected graph around in the soundspace — yes the particular sounds might shift, but it's the relation between them that encodes meaning, and that is preserved. In that sense "English pronunciation" does exist.

[pif]

> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Well well... as it is called English, scholars from cultural institutions rooted in England are the reference. Everybody else is free to speak their own language, but one is proper English, while the others are at most somewhere-English.

[dontlaugh]

That’s a particularly bad example, as accents vary more within England than in most other English speaking countries. Cockneys and Geordies sound nothing alike and there is no way to have unified and consistent spelling between them.

[pif]

"Scholars from cultural institutions rooted in England" is different from "the first person crossing the street in a random English town".

[crashmat]

I think they might be referencing recieved pronunciation?