My English learning process was me being a eight year old kid who wanted to play diablo. No clue about shit. Barely able to read in the first place and just going from one word which is similar to one in my native language to the next similar one. Like "ok, intelligence looks a lot like intelligenz. Dexterity makes my bow do more damage so it should be something like speed or whatever" so basically trial and error over the years. The pronunciation was accordingly. As an example, strength was "stren g t hö". Not sure how I'm supposed to write what i said back then xD Still to this day from reading and such and not practicing enough speaking English some are way off.
I feel like this is especially true for English since it seems to me there are no spelling rules that convey pronunciation. You can have 2 words spelled completely the same save from one letter and the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.
I'm not sure how this is in other languages, but in my native german (which is always said to be difficult to learn) when you understand the spelling rules you can always assume the correct pronunciation of a word. Certain letter combinations always amount to the same way of pronouncing it.
I guess this is because both languages started out in the germanic language family, but over the course of history english adapted way more from other languages and just made them their own. Including differences in spelling, but maybe not as much pronunciation. Best example is "Bologna", which is still the italian/latin spelling, but no one near italy would call it "Baloney" .
I'm always amazed at how native speakers learn to write things like that, since you cant count on what you hear at all.
Anyone else say "ba-LO-na" for something with coarsely ground meat and heavier spice - e.g. "Lebanon Bologna" - and "ba-LO-nee" for the Oscar Mayer stuff?
I loved my dad, but he was always a professor, so proper English was a priority. Honestly, that particular aspect of my upbringing is not one of the upsetting or traumatic parts.
Interestingly though, I recently learned that he drilled something that was essentially incorrect into my head. He grew up in the UK and, when he was growing up, it was proper to write "an historic." Here in the US and now usually in the UK, it is "a historic." I've been using "an historic" for decades.
If you want to talk about the shitty thing about having an English professor for a father, it's when you show him a piece of creative writing and he responds by telling you about all the mistakes you've made rather than what he thinks of it. Again, I loved the guy, but he was always a professor.
On the other hand, he ended up becoming a film historian and growing up with a film historian for a father is pretty amazing.
(Thanks on the health front, we're working on it.)
Which American accent? We talken west coast standard, East Coast standard, Appalachian, Yooper, Inland Imperial, Bakersfield, Rocky Mountain North or South ya gotta he more specific.
That's how i was until i took a French class. Before that, I was trying to fit everything into a single set of rules with a multitude of exceptions. But really there are multiple sets of rules. Learning another set of rules for a language that had such a huge impact on what English is today really helped (although, there are still plenty of exceptions to keep in mind lol)
Unless, of course, they read books that exist just to tell you how to pronounce words. I remember seeing a gigantic book on display at a Borders years ago that was nothing but odd (and often very large medical term) words and how to pronounce them.
Truth...hah! I still have words I have to look up on the sly on the internet and click one of those definition services that will pronounce the word for you so I don't sound completely wrong.
I pronounced epitome epi-tome for the longest time. Now as I read, I pop onto Google when I encounter something I'm unfamiliar with. And I'm 36, my job has me fairly familiar with the English language, but I swear some writers discover a word and they're like "can't wait to use this two or three times in the next couple chapters."
It's that and character/place names, but character names are dangerous lookups, spoiled a plot in WoT looking up how to pronounce Moraine. And the worst part is her name's pretty obvious, but I fucking looked it up anyway. I thought Hermione was obvious as a kid, but that's probably because I transposed the I and O, now that I think about it.
