Me speaking to a French guy last week -
“We’ve just been the the musée de l’automobile in Mulhouse”
“Sorry, where?”
“Mulhouse”
“Where?”
“Mulhouse”
"Aaaaaah I see! It’s pronounced [pronounces Mulhouse *exactly the same FUCKING way I just pronounced it]
😂 Happens very regularly
Just because your ears can’t hear a difference doesn’t mean that there is none. I deal with this a lot when Japanese ask me for help and can’t differentiate between certain sounds
Yeah in Japanese a few consonant sounds like ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds or ‘h’/‘f’ or ‘s’/‘th’ or ‘z’/‘ð’ are basically heard as the same (an American ‘r’ might even sound like a weird ‘w’ to Japanese), and English has around 17 to 24 distinctive vowel sounds generally (based on quality) while Japanese has 5 plus vowel length and tones (pitch accent). As a result of the phonetic differences between the languages, it can be hard to hear or recreate the differences in sound quality (especially when it’s Japanese on the speaking/listening end, but Americans also sure have a terrible time trying to make Japanese sounds like the “n” or “r” or “ch”/“j” or “sh”/“zh” or “f” or “u”. they just perceive it as the same as the closest sounds in English)
In my experience, only God can hear the difference between Polish “dż” and “dź” / “cz” and “ć” (and the others)…
English also doesn’t have gemination (small tsu) which does make a difference in Japanese as well. Hearing that in very quick Japanese for words I don’t know can still be different. Same with vowel length. Once you know the word, it doesn’t matter as much how someone says it, but when it’s new vocab and the speaker is very quick, it can be tough.
Wait, how does ch/j or sh differ from the English sounds? And what words use zh? I don’t think I’ve seen that romaji
No offense intended since I’m fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck “squirrel” specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn’t close to being the exact same as that guy
For all languages I have learned so far ‘squirrel’ is really hard to pronounce for non-native speakers.
English: squirrel
French: écureuil
And the germans kill it with: Eichhörnchen
Ignore the letters in English, it helps just as much as ignoring the letters in French.
Squirrel is pronounced like skwir-rel.
If it makes you feel better, most Americans can’t pronounce squirrel either.
“Skwerl”
To add to what that other person said, when you grow up your brain gets used to hearing the sounds common to your accent and you can even stop hearing the difference between certain sounds when someone speaks your language with a different accent!
In Quebec french there’s a big difference between the sound of “pré” and “prè” that doesn’t exist with some of the french accents in France and they’re unable to recreate that difference and might even be unable to hear it!
Yep. I took a language psych class in college, and we saw some examples of this that were crazy, especially being one of the people that can’t hear the difference.
I can’t remember the example, but just imagine somebody saying the same word to you twice and then a third party telling you the first person just said two different words.
“Pré” and “prè” consistently sound distinctly different in most, dare I say almost all, accents in mainland France. The difference is the same with basically all words spelled with those vowels. “Ê” also sounds like a long “è” in most words for most people. “e” also sounds like “é” when before silent letters except for “t”, and sounds like “è” when before multiple letters or before “x” or before silent “t” or if it’s the last sound except for open monosyllabic words, and it sounds special or is silent elsewhere. “-ent” is always silent too. Obviously doesn’t apply to “en/em”, also special exception for “-er/-es”.
This video wouldn’t exist with the Quebecois accent because the three words wouldn’t be considered homonyms.
