My experience is that English speakers are terrible at knowing how many syllables there are in a word. I think it has a lot to do with how our vowels are. Some

My experience is that English speakers are terrible at knowing how many syllables there are in a word. I think it has a lot to do with how our vowels are. Some vowels like /i/ tend to get their own syllable in places where most languages would blend it into an adjacent vowel and maybe make it into /j/. Other times what we think of as a single vowel is actually 2-3 vowels.