What causes the trouble with American W? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

What causes the trouble with American W?
Tags: Pronunciation
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

jeff_lindqvist
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Message 17 of 18

28 July 2013 at 8:11pm | IP Logged

IronFist wrote:

Can Swedish people distinguish the two phonemes?

Of course we can. In fact, most Swedes probably do, but they don't care. Most Swedes don't have to speak English daily, most tourists are happy to get away with English while in Sweden, and don't care much whether the average Swedish person has a perfect RP accent or not.
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Bao
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Message 18 of 18

01 August 2013 at 2:36am | IP Logged

anime wrote:

With Swedish people it's actually a matter of pronouncing W instead of V.
They often end up pronouncing all
English V's as W's, so wery for very, wast instead of vast etc.

In Swedish there's only the V, so they might lazily presume there's only W in English. It
really annoys me
when people do it

I myself have trouble with overcorrecting v sounds in English words I don't use
frequently, so I'd rather not see it put down as 'laziness'. Splitting phonemes that have
corresponding cognates and loanwords for both target variants is one of the trickier
parts of target language pronunciation, and even when you know the rules it's easy to
make mistakes when speaking to communicate, and not simply for accurate pronunciation.
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