Foreign accent traps for native English speakers

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I have to agree with these observations here. The tendency to pucker up your lips when you say "u", the tendency to move your tongue a lot when you make "e" and "o" sounds, the tendency to centralize non-stressed vowels, and the tendency in American English to use r-colored and l-colored vowels (as well, I say, the English pronunciation of "r") often marks native English speakers speaking other languages:

http://www.mimicmethod.com/blog/four-pr ... ion-errors

If you listen to the guy singing Somos Pacifico, he, for example, uses the English "i" when pronuncing Pacifico instead of using the proper Spanish "i" vowel.

I wonder what native Spanish speakers think of Señor No-Flow's singing.

Very interesting. I couldn't listen to the audio files for some reason but without listening to them I know what that post/article is talking about. Apart from the /u/ error, I'm familiar with those pronunciation errors. I have seen quite a few websites and printed materials for native English speakers explaining (falsely) that /e/ and /o/ in some other languages should be pronounced like 'ey' and 'oh' in English.

Funnily enough, non-native English speakers tend to make pronunciation errors that are the opposite of what's described in that article when they speak English.

Spanish /i/ shouldn't be very hard to produce for an English speaker; it has the same vowel quality as an English long /i:/ (as in see), but it's short. Even if you pronounce it long, it doesn't matter all that much, because Spanish doesn't have long vowels, so it'll just look like you're lengthening it for emphasis.

They are like the vowel you pronounce at the beginning of the diphthong, without the following change in vowel quality. Unless, of course, the vowel you pronounce at the beginning of oh is a schwa, like it is in Received Pronunciation.



English has a lot of vowels, so that is to be expected. For example, there's a single Spanish vowel closest to those in cat, cut, cart (in non-rhotic accents), cot (in accents in which this vowel is unrounded), and even caught (with the cot-caught merger); namely, /a/; so it's hard for Spanish speakers to tell them apart, and even harder not to merge them in their own pronunciation.

Besides, native speakers of languages with no reduced vowels have to make a conscious effort not to render the second i in definitely as full and vivid as its counterpart in definition, and wonder how native English speakers can misspell the former word as *definately.

Mis-understandings Over-Powered...

I absolutely agree. There are so many differences in our speaking. When I was trying to enter UK university I ordered from [url=http:// [/url] my essay, but I forget to mention that I needed it with UK words and slang That was my mistake.

Last edited by B19 on 20 Mar 2020, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.: spammer

In Spanish "I" equals "long E". That's pretty simple stuff that we all mastered in middle school pretty fast.

But yes-there are loads of other pitfalls both ways. Like any language English has its idiosyncracies.

Probably the weirdest common word in English is "children".

We native speakers use it all of the time without thinking anything of it. But if you DO think about it ....why is the plural of "child" ..."children"?

Foreigners will fumble around by saying "childs", or "childrens".

The word is a relic of the Dark Ages Anglo Saxon language (which was more like modern German, than modern English) in which they indicated plural by sticking an 'en' on the end of the word. Like "oxen". Centuries later, after Britain had been invaded by Vikings and Normans and the language took a beating from invading languages it became the convention to indicate plural by sticking an 's' on the end of the noun. But we still retain the Germanic 'en' on some words:like "oxen", and "brethren" ( even this word is only used in certain contexts- usually we just say 'brothers'), and in at least one commonly used everyday word: "children".

A Serbian lady I worked with once talked about how Americans would scream at her to "write the silent 'e' on the end of the word" and she would say "Why? You don't pronounce it!", and they would say "you just DO it. Don't ask WHY!".

But a thousand years ago the English DID pronounce the 'e' at the end of all those words in English that end with a silent 'e' today.

If you move to the USA: don't EVER confuse the expression "get out of my face!" with the expression "get OFF my face!" LOL!

A common way immigrants become laughingstocks in the workplace in my experience!

Exactly, but they don't explain it in that way. Some even give transliteration using 'ey' and 'oh' for /e/ and /o/ respectively. Not surprisingly I often hear 'ey', 'oh', 'ee', 'ah' etc when native English speakers try to say foreign words. I find it very strange.


I know that from my own experience. Even now, although I speak English fluently, I find telling those similar vowels apart difficult. For example, 'flutter' and 'flatter' sound exactly the same to me. Also, 'hug' and 'hag' a bit similar. But 'cat' and 'cut' don't sound similar at all. However, I can pronounce all those words correctly because I know how to control my tongue to produce those vowel sounds. Funny one: my coworker can't say 'coke'. She instead keeps saying 'cock'.


Many non-native English speakers do that. But I don't think it affects how well other people understand them. It just makes them sound non-native. When I didn't speak English, I could more easily remember how to spell English words because I tended to pronounce them somewhat as they were spelled. As I speak English properly now, it's harder to remember how to spell those unstressed vowels. For example, I sometimes have to check whether a word ends with '-ance' or '-ence'.

Not only does English espoken with Espanish vowels create funny homophonies like eat-it, beach-b***h or sheet-s**t; it also makes sentences like Geeks don't get chicks rhyme.