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English as a second language learners: what words were really hard for you to pronounce?
(discuss.tchncs.de)
'Anthropomorphous' is still like a tongue twsiter for me
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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"sorry". I mainly use English in my daily life and at work for several years now, but cannot make it not sound like "sowy" or roll "r" too much.
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?
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There are words I really ~~hate~~ struggle with...
Whirl, macabre, dairy, faux, chique.
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the things i remember struggling with were getting the stress right and hyperforeignisms (that is, concentrating so hard on getting the difficult "w" and "th" sounds that i would pronounce "v" as "w" and "s" as "th" by accident. i was once asked if my native language had a "v", because that was the one i seemed to be struggling with)
For turkish speakers generally, its every single multi-syllable word. In turkish, syllables arent stressed and most syllables are pronounced equally. And since in english stress is very important for pronunciation, my peers' (and teachers in schools) speech is unintelligable
Entrepreneur
I think I was just pronouncing everything wrong for the first several years I was speaking English because I learnt English from books and never heard most words out loud. But I don't remember anything being physically difficult to pronounce in terms of emulating how it's said when I first hear it pronounced "correctly".
Everything was hard. Even now I can't speak or pronounce every word. The reason: in my country learning english means learning how to write right, speaking is not important. So yeah, you have to teach yourself by speaking with others, if you find other people who really want to improve how to pronounce right. Even now I feel chills when I remember how my english teacher pronounced Switzerland.
Routing (e.g. for cables or traces on a pcb). I've heard both over the years: as in cangaroo or the german Frau. But the latter might be a german mis pronounciation.
Which brings up two new questions. Is it German or german and mispronounciation or mis pronounciation or mis-pronounciation?
Mispronunciation. "Mis" isn't a word, but a prefix (or something) that gets attached to another word to modify it. Since it's not its own word, it gets prepended to the root word ("pronounce" in this case) without a dash.
German would always have the capital. In English, proper nouns get capitalized. There's an official list, I'd bet, but a good rule of thumb is that titles (books, movies), specific place names (Germany, London, Abbey Road), people's names (Bob, Reiner), and "I" (but not "me" etc) are put into "Title Case". (Title case wouldn't be capitalized, I just typed it that way to demonstrate it)
I actually like a lot of the German capitalization rules. On the internet, a lot of people will be more casual with capitalization. Some people will capitalize "important words", or things that aren't proper nouns but have a different meaning than usual...but these kinds of things are improper.
As for routing (and router, and heck...route in general)...both are correct pronunciations of this "ou". I think "au" is more common for networking in North America, and "oo" is more common in other English-speaking countries (the UK, Australia...).
As for "route" as in "Route 56", I tend to hear and say both/either (I'm in North America).
Sorry it's so inconsistent!
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