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English as a second language learners: what words were really hard for you to pronounce?
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Facade as Fack-aid, is one.
I've never heard anyone of any native language pronounce it fack-aid? The English speakers I hear always say fuh-saad. Or are you saying that fack-aid is how you pronounce it and you struggle with fuh-saad?
Most loan-words are hard for ESL learners, they retain the original language pronunciation and break many phonetic rules of English pronunciation.
Oh so you're saying the latter.
Fuh-saad is pretty in line with English pronunciation "rules" (though English doesn't really have pronunciation rules the same way other languages doโsee though, through, cough, bough, etc). Maybe a more "English" way of saying it would be fuh-sayd, but I think the c would be interpreted as a soft c even if it weren't a loanword. Again, hard to say with English which is notoriously inconsistent though.