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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Penelope Diglot Senior Member Greece Joined 3866 days ago 110 posts - 155 votes  Speaks: English, French Studies: Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 33 of 134 20 May 2014 at 9:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I thought Italian would be easy because I already knew french and because it is supposed to be easy.
No. As for the -th sound. Try saying "the thunder" and you get a pretty good idea of two different ways of saying it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3839 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 34 of 134 20 May 2014 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||
In your description of the "en" vowel, you describe in fact 3 different sounds.. Edited by Arnaud25 on 20 May 2014 at 10:43am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3985 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 35 of 134 20 May 2014 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I am fairly familiar with the majority of European languages and I find English the weirdest, least logical, and most difficult to pronounce.
The correct pronunciation of "th" is indeed a problem for many of us. I deliberately avoid saying "I thought" preferring "I was thinking" because the first can be misunderstood either as "fought" or "sought" or "taught", but if I say "I was tinking" or "I was finking" it'll be sort of OK. But weird sounds are not the biggest problem. The real challenge is the rules of pronunciation, or rather the lack of them. When I first realised that "finite" is pronounced as "fainait" whilst "infinite" is pronounced as "infinit" I gave up studying English for about a year. I know that there might be some rules mostly based on stress patterns, but for us, speakers of syllable-timed languages even stress-timing is something unfathomable. English is certainly easier for me than Arabic or Mandarin Chinese, but among the so-called easy languages without doubt English is the most difficult. Edited by Hungringo on 20 May 2014 at 11:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5225 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 36 of 134 20 May 2014 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Your'e quite right and I stand corrected. Regarding the vowel, the list should be "in im ain aim ein eim ien yn ym." Edited by ScottScheule on 20 May 2014 at 3:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6906 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 134 20 May 2014 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
And Albanian, Cornish, Galician, Welsh and the Tuscan dialect of Italian. Source: Voiceless dental fricative / Occurrence (Wikipedia) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gustavo Russi Tetraglot Newbie Brazil Joined 3840 days ago 9 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French, Italian | Message 38 of 134 20 May 2014 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
it is silent as the "t" at the end of "internet" is silent. you say it, just not with a vowel at the end (which means, it's a silent consonant :P) What I'm trying to say here is what has already been said by another person: the word "monde" is NEVER spelled like "moan". If you want to compare it to this word, you should at least write it in the past tense (moaned), that to get just a slightly close comparation. In fact, the "D" in "monde" has the exact same pronunciation (in rapid speech, that is) of the word "world" (when you speak slowly, the "de" is deeper, something easily noticed in many Edith Piaf's songs). Someone who says they've never heard a french person pronounce "monde" with it's "D" sound has probably never heard a french person pronouncing "monde" :P Edited by Gustavo Russi on 20 May 2014 at 8:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 39 of 134 20 May 2014 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Um no, a silent consonant is one that is written but not pronounced. You might be mixing it up with voiceless.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4662 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 40 of 134 21 May 2014 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
I'm not really sure what you're driving at. In casual American English speech, the "t" at the end of "Internet" is often realized as a glottal stop rather than a real "t," but that is definitely not the case for the "d" in "monde." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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