8 ms·
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 h
by dvirsky 5y ago
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 5y agoAren't week/weak and piece/peace pronounced exactly the same?
- 3pt14159 5y agoThey're really quite close, both pairs of them. But the emphasis isn't quite the same as most people speak it.
- ff7c11 5y agoI think they're identical.
- danielheath 5y agoI’m sure, in many accents, that they are. Definitely not the same in Australian Strine.
- hunter2_ 5y agoAs an American, I knew about Straya but this is the first I've heard of Strine. Or should I say Murican :)
- no_carrier 5y agoThey're identical in Australian English.
- danielheath 5y agoWhich one?
- leephillips 5y agoThey 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 5y agoYeah what I meant is that it just increases the possibilities of awkwardness. Piss of cake, piss process, etc.
- shazar 5y agodictionary.com shows both with the same IPA: \wik\ and \pis\.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoAs 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- irrational 5y agoThey are for me. Exactly the same pronunciation and emphasis. Maybe there are some dialects of English where they are not pronounced the same.
- chrisweekly 5y agoYes, they're homophones.
- ericbarrett 5y agoI'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger
- 3pt14159 5y agoPeace 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.
- ff7c11 5y agoFrench speakers often struggle with beach/bitch :)
- desert_boi 5y agoIn 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).
- alfonsodev 5y agoAs Spanish speaker I struggled myself with that one, sweating, and probably over correcting making the e super long beeeeach to be safe. :D
- blowski 5y agoThere's also the classic can't, count, and cunt (the last being one of the most offensive expletives).
- dvirsky 5y agoFor me that actually was easier - learning English mostly from TV as a kid I just pronounced can't as "kent".
- pmontra 5y agoItalian 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.
- cortesoft 5y agoAs a native Californian, I pronounce week and weak the same. Not sure about other places.