The pronunciation of words in English is not always straightforward. Unlike some languages, such as French or Spanish, there is not always a direct relationship between the spelling of words and how they are said aloud. In technical terms, there is not always a consistent relationship betweengrap...
Many linguists believe that of all the world languages, Armenian is most closely related to Greek. Armenian includes many Greek loanwords and lexical cognates, and the Armenian alphabet was modeled after the Greek alphabet. However, these languages are still so different that speakers of one langua...
hardest English words to pronounce, even for native speakers. Test your English knowledge and see whether you can pronounce these words correctly. We’re curious to know how many you got right!1. Rural[ˈrʊrəl]There’s no way you can pronounce this word without twisting your tongue!
Not all vowels are written out, which means you need to know lots of words before you can recognize them while reading and know how to pronounce them. Imagine reading the English wordRDand knowing it could bered, rid, rod, rad,etc. The context helps you figure out the word’s meaning ...
What's that first "l" doing in there? And where does the "r" sound come from? Well, the pronunciation of the wordcolonelhas to do with the word's French and Italian translations. When yousay the word, you want to pronounce it like a popcorn "kernel." ...
These languages include (besides French, Spanish, Italian), Romanian, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, and Romansh. They claim that it is relatively easy to decipher many of the words in the respective second language because of the huge number of words stemming from Latin. So learning both ...
and Korean is also an agglutinative language: by tacking on more and more, complex words are formed. This concept doesn’t exist in English. The alphabet is easier to learn than in Chinese or Japanese. However, mispronunciation will lead to misunderstandings quickly as there are many difficult ...
Polish spelling and grammar require hard work, patience, and repetition to master. Words in this language contain a lot of consonants which can make them hard to spell and pronounce. Instead of six cases like Russian, Polish has seven, so there’s a lot to learn before you can try communi...
Before we even attempt to get ourselves through the pronunciation of some of Illinois' harder to pronounce cities and towns, we have to take on the pronunciation of our state's name first. I've always thought that the quickest way to pick out a visitor or someone who has just moved to ...
Chinese, by contrast, is very difficult to learn to pronounce, though the Chinese themselves are quite forgiving and helpful about tones, so the process can be pleasant and even fun. So there’s my take on a question that I hear a lot. It is obviously debatable. And I am not trying ...