5 ms·

Right. It's basically because of the aggressively anti-phonetic nature of English orthography that phonetic spellings look "wrong" or "stupid" to us.

cycomanic 5y ago
The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit. This is very different to some other languages (e.g. Japanese is famous for it), where only a slight mispronounciation usually means nobody will understand what you're saying. I have encountered this many times, I pronounced a word just how I heard it and people were just giving me blank stares, only when I showed the spelled word did they get it. I never encountered this with English native speakers.
- jasonkester 5y ago
  Are you sue that’s the reason? French has an equally wacky spelling system, but French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right). Meanwhile, Spanish, with its perfect phonetic spelling is spoken by a people who will go out of their way to understand you no matter how bad you speak their language. My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right). I think it's a mix of multiple reasons. First, French is a language which not only has no word stress but actively blends words together when speacking in a sentence. Correct word pronunciation is key to understanding and what foreigners view as small errors sometimes do actually make their sentence unintelligible to a French speaker from France. Then, language proficiency is a strong social marker in France. So, if you speak broken French, people will subconsciously view you as lower class/uneducated.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Your mileage may vary, but my experience with Danish and Norwegian is similar. Norwegian which has very phonetic spelling is very forgiving on mispronunciation while Danish—a very similar language but spelled much differently and not very phonetically—is not nearly as forgiving on mispronunciation, and being Danish you do mispronounce a lot as you are learning the language.
    - ihateolives 5y ago
      Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
  - coremoff 5y ago
    I had a similar experience when I tried to learn Polish; my friends, who knew I was trying to learn, simply couldn't understand what I was saying, and couldn't guess either (and my ear found it very difficult to hear the difference between the expected pronunciation and what I was saying). My heart wasn't really in it, but I was also very discouraged by this.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    > French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners Keyword: refuse. They can, but pretend they don’t. It’s racism disguising itself as cultural pride. (Source: I’m French and am certainly not proud of that part of my heritage)
    - krageon 5y ago
      > It’s racism It's elitism, France's hate of foreigners is not founded on skin colour or heritage (e.g. both your parents can be French and if your French is bad, you get treated poorly anyway).
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        It's not founded on skin color you're right, but you're wrong about heritage. Obviously Not All French People Are Like That (I should hope so, as a French person myself). But the ones concerned will be MUCH pickier about people's grammar, spelling and pronunciation if they perceive them as not French. But yes, elitism is also present: If you're perceived as French and your french is bad, you will also be treated poorly. But it's a different kind of "poorly". In fact, Paul Taylor talks about that in his stand up "Franglais" (I HIGHLY recommend a watch, it's hilarious especially if you're familiar with both French and British/American culture, and it's available for free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA)
      - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
        The right word is chauvinism, no?
        drran 5y ago
        No. Chauvinism is when somebody declares that his/her language is superior to other languages, e.g. because it used by a broad audience. Russian and English speakers are often doing that from my own experience.
  - pimterry 5y ago
    > My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out. I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects. For example, there's a very large number of Spanish speakers worldwide with a very wide variety of accents and dialects, plus large numbers of non-native speakers. That also applies to English, but doesn't apply so much to French (not that there's zero variety, but compare the content of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French). Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc). I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.
    - thematrixturtle 5y ago
      Eh, France also has a number of languages that are distinctly not French. But it also has a long history of being a heavily centralized state where everything revolves around Paris, and other languages/dialects were ruthlessly suppressed for a long time.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit. Oh dear. This is really not my experience. In the first couple of years I lived in the UK it was a huge pain making myself understood by the natives, until I finally managed to approximate the local accent. I was even very frustrated that nobody seemed to make an effort to meet me half-way, in my efforts to be understood. I would often have this experience, where I'd be speaking to someone and they'd stare at me with a blank face, seemingly just waiting for me to repeat myself in case they could understand me this time around. Among non-native English speakers I think this experience is common. Conversely, I've been able to communicate just fine with non-native English speakers who had very thick accents and spoke only broken English, exactly because both parties in the conversation were patient and attentive. In my Master's I had a tutor from Indonesia. For me he was like the best teacher ever and I felt he made everything crystal clear and helped me really understand some hairy concepts. Then I spoke to a British friend who complained she couldn't understand a word he was saying and she hated every minute of his class. Sometimes I think native and non-native speakers of English really speak two different languages.
avgcorrection 5y ago
It doesn’t look wrong or stupid.

cycomanic 5y ago

The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit. This is very different to some other languages (e.g. Japanese is famous for it), where only a slight mispronounciation usually means nobody will understand what you're saying. I have encountered this many times, I pronounced a word just how I heard it and people were just giving me blank stares, only when I showed the spelled word did they get it. I never encountered this with English native speakers.

jasonkester 5y ago
Are you sue that’s the reason? French has an equally wacky spelling system, but French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right). Meanwhile, Spanish, with its perfect phonetic spelling is spoken by a people who will go out of their way to understand you no matter how bad you speak their language. My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right). I think it's a mix of multiple reasons. First, French is a language which not only has no word stress but actively blends words together when speacking in a sentence. Correct word pronunciation is key to understanding and what foreigners view as small errors sometimes do actually make their sentence unintelligible to a French speaker from France. Then, language proficiency is a strong social marker in France. So, if you speak broken French, people will subconsciously view you as lower class/uneducated.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Your mileage may vary, but my experience with Danish and Norwegian is similar. Norwegian which has very phonetic spelling is very forgiving on mispronunciation while Danish—a very similar language but spelled much differently and not very phonetically—is not nearly as forgiving on mispronunciation, and being Danish you do mispronounce a lot as you are learning the language.
  - ihateolives 5y ago
    Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
- coremoff 5y ago
  I had a similar experience when I tried to learn Polish; my friends, who knew I was trying to learn, simply couldn't understand what I was saying, and couldn't guess either (and my ear found it very difficult to hear the difference between the expected pronunciation and what I was saying). My heart wasn't really in it, but I was also very discouraged by this.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  > French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners Keyword: refuse. They can, but pretend they don’t. It’s racism disguising itself as cultural pride. (Source: I’m French and am certainly not proud of that part of my heritage)
  - krageon 5y ago
    > It’s racism It's elitism, France's hate of foreigners is not founded on skin colour or heritage (e.g. both your parents can be French and if your French is bad, you get treated poorly anyway).
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      It's not founded on skin color you're right, but you're wrong about heritage. Obviously Not All French People Are Like That (I should hope so, as a French person myself). But the ones concerned will be MUCH pickier about people's grammar, spelling and pronunciation if they perceive them as not French. But yes, elitism is also present: If you're perceived as French and your french is bad, you will also be treated poorly. But it's a different kind of "poorly". In fact, Paul Taylor talks about that in his stand up "Franglais" (I HIGHLY recommend a watch, it's hilarious especially if you're familiar with both French and British/American culture, and it's available for free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA)
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
      The right word is chauvinism, no?
      - drran 5y ago
        No. Chauvinism is when somebody declares that his/her language is superior to other languages, e.g. because it used by a broad audience. Russian and English speakers are often doing that from my own experience.
- pimterry 5y ago
  > My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out. I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects. For example, there's a very large number of Spanish speakers worldwide with a very wide variety of accents and dialects, plus large numbers of non-native speakers. That also applies to English, but doesn't apply so much to French (not that there's zero variety, but compare the content of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French). Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc). I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.
  - thematrixturtle 5y ago
    Eh, France also has a number of languages that are distinctly not French. But it also has a long history of being a heavily centralized state where everything revolves around Paris, and other languages/dialects were ruthlessly suppressed for a long time.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit. Oh dear. This is really not my experience. In the first couple of years I lived in the UK it was a huge pain making myself understood by the natives, until I finally managed to approximate the local accent. I was even very frustrated that nobody seemed to make an effort to meet me half-way, in my efforts to be understood. I would often have this experience, where I'd be speaking to someone and they'd stare at me with a blank face, seemingly just waiting for me to repeat myself in case they could understand me this time around. Among non-native English speakers I think this experience is common. Conversely, I've been able to communicate just fine with non-native English speakers who had very thick accents and spoke only broken English, exactly because both parties in the conversation were patient and attentive. In my Master's I had a tutor from Indonesia. For me he was like the best teacher ever and I felt he made everything crystal clear and helped me really understand some hairy concepts. Then I spoke to a British friend who complained she couldn't understand a word he was saying and she hated every minute of his class. Sometimes I think native and non-native speakers of English really speak two different languages.

avgcorrection 5y ago

It doesn’t look wrong or stupid.