I remember this poem from one of my schoolbooks: I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough and through? Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead- For goodness sake don't call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt). A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother, And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front and word and sword, And do and go and thwart and cart - Come, come, I've hardly made a start! A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five! (According to one source I found it's attributed to T S Watt, 1954, from the Manchester Guardian)

Super kanal mit viel spass und ironie die english -deutschen beziehungen verbessern

I know that a lot of German speakers (including news readers) struggle with "[Queen] Elizabeth" 😆

awesome video!!

Thanks for clearing up this Worcester Sauce thing. Now I can finally take a well educated position in those heated discussions at german dining tables.

Wolverhampton Wolverines. I read it was used to uncover German spies in WW2.

I think Roger may have been referring to the tank rather than the town

"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition". That Monty Python sketch is a tongue-twister for Germans.

interesting are those places with names ending in - shire.

The ghoti thing is so funny!

Eurythrocytes Eurythrozyten

Earlier I had problems with refrigerator , then I came upon enthusiasm and related words. If I start the first syllable wrongly then that it´s. Btw I am Viennese and worked in Scotland , so my English pronounciation is a bit harder and works well with my Glaswegian accent.

Worcestershire and the so namend sauce is a miracle!

Icelandic has even two letters for lisp sounds: ð and þ (ð like in "the" and þ like in "thin"). And they can combine them in one word like "það"; I think English has at most one "th" in a word.

Listen to Dr. Spitzer from University of Ulm. He can tell how we learn our Mother's tongues and about the urgency to follow a teacher in pronouncing. It's our brains that become more and more inflexible when aging. I can tell this by my Mother's tongue bavarian. Nobody can speak accent-free bavarian who didn't "suck it with his mothers milk" as we use to say. Learning a foreign language is a subjekt of learning by doing. To know the grammar-rules is a nice addon. In other words. Did your mother tell you the english grammar-rules when you were a child in oder to teach you the english language ? Tell me if it was like this. My secondary english-teachers were called Lennon/McCartney and thus pronouncing isn´t an issue to me but grammar was at school. "Habe die Ehre" and best regards from South-east-upper-bavaria

1:48 Icelandic has TH sounds.

Is there actually a difference between the pronounciations of "draught" and "draft"?

For me February is hard to pronounce.

I struggle with TH+R. Although I can pronounce TH and R separately, it just won't work in combination. It's difficult to explain, but it seems to be too hard for me to roll the tongue back from my teeth after a TH. The tongue just doesn't want to move back, it has a life of its own. So it usually becomes somehow a tapped R. Some people told me my TH+R sounds Scottish...

Das Problem ist eigentlich: Man hört ein fremdes Wort und weiß nicht wie ein oder mehrere Laute davon erzeugt werden. Stattdessen versucht man aus dem eigenen Repertoire etwas halbwegs passendes herauszusuchen.

"Zär vär two peanuts valking down der Straße, but van vaz assaulted... peanut." Love it when native English speakers make fun of our accent =). I had a classmate with this accent, but otherwise he was very smart.

I was thinking the whole about which word struggles me: suggestion.... my husband said 1 of 5 tries works.

Der Törn ist auch ein deutsches Wort. An- oder abtörnen kennt der Duden auch.

11:14 ist die beste Stelle :)

I find it soft endings hard (no pun intended). Or slurring words together at the right point. Or English language melody. Or exactly how to exactly pronounce A.

Even the German KZfaq channel with this name never mentions, that "hyperbole" is not pronounced "hyper-bowl" ... I would have never "guessed" the correct way though. And, not long ago my American buddy started laughing, when I mentioned a "fast food drive in", asking me, why I am using "in" instead of "thru", showing me a picture of a typical "B.K. sign" for a drive thru. So I showed him a picture of our version of the German "drive in" signs of companies like this :) ! (I do not know if it is true, but google told me, they changed it to make it easier for Germans to just use "in" without any "th-sound" - but I did not get earlier, that "we are literally crashing into this building" :) !) Plus, I just noticed, I do not get/I am not able to hear the differences between the wrong and the correct version of pronouncing "vampire" or "vice" - so I assume, I am also pronouncing it wrong !

In the US, the "r" is even more horrible. I have seen a documentary about a train I have traveled with, and a man said "Transcontinental Railroad". Hard to understand. This is what is sounds like: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/q5ecp9Kqp6iyn5c.html at 5.05.

Mein killer ist Maschaschooschitz, oder whatever this state is called.

months ... th followed by s ... impossible to pronounce. some people seem to have strange problems regarding v and w. so _very well_ often comes out as _wery vell_ ..

4:21: Hydrocloroquine... I don't know that either. I only know hydroxychloroquine. ;-)

Both English and German is easy to pronounce as a Norwegian.

Well i never really had these problems. I am phonic lerner so i hear the vocabulary before i know how to spell it. So my spelling is more messed up then my pronounceation. I am also good at copying sounds i heared. I never noticed that my talent isnt standard. I mean aside from the usual strong accent germans usually have. Maybe because i am from saxony and our accent is verry soft compared to other germans when using Hochdeutsch. So i am quite used to "lazy sounds". So that could add on to it Edit: i have a problem to decide if women is a singular or plural now So its mor an reading or spelling issue I mean why dont just spell the plural Wymen or whimen Would make it much mor easy

The US state "Massachusetts" is a real tongue twister

And then there is Manchester, which is pretty much spoken as it is written because there is an "h" behind the "c". Funny!

Hi Richie, what a great post on the pronounciation of certain english words. I love this because I am a fanatic on this subject. I hate the German way to pronounce nearly all words with an "A" in it as an "A" like I häve, she häs and so on. Not even an American would say "häppy or cät. The TH or "V" is not so much a problem. When I started out in the US to speak English and then came to England, I was a bit confused. I was always corrected when I said: Wegetables and Miami wice and so on: Today I would like to correct Germans when they say : Sänk you - sis is my händy etc. When I start on this subject I always use your english towns as well :.i.e. Towcester - Gloucester- Bicester -Cirencester - and the ones you mentioned in your post. My first test with my English wife is still a favourite of mine: With these teeth it is difficult to breath. By the way, my son lives for decades now in Barcelona and he is a language and golf teacher. Look forward to read your next post, maybe on Football. Sorry I am a Bayern supporter but nobody is perfect. English teams I follow are the Magpies and Leeds !

Overcompensation is interesting. French people - once they got the hang of it - put Hs everywhere. Hair conditioning and such.

And because linguists have a strange sense of humour "ghoti" is now the klingon word for "fish". Yes, there is a constructed klingon language.

I once watched a video about the v/w of Germans and apparently the German w sound is between those two sounds so it's common for German to confuse them and do the German sound and maybe then go too much into the wrong direction I think this is the video which deals with this topic m.kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rsd8ZcdztrOoZGQ.html

Lester, Gloster, Wuster... :-D But it is actually Lancaster, not Lanster.

wieviele " Unsichbare " vokale hat das englische ( s W ord z.B. ) und warum dieses " OUGH" in manchen wörtern mit sovielen verschiedenen aussprachen beispiele...?! Abought, Altough, Anough, Thought.... usw.

Germans talk like they write. Anglophones, well... to lead - lead seizure - leisure reading - Reading comb - tomb February - brewery ... Southwark. Gloucestershire...

Richie, my most difficult Englisch (sic!) phrase was "I came here voluntarily." It's quite embarrassing when you mistake the n for a p.

Hallo, ich liebe es wenn du dies übertriebene deutsche Englisch sprichst , bzw den harten und ungelenken Klang den wir dann haben, es tut mir als deutsch Sprecher schon fast weh aber (leider) ist es so 😆👍

ghoti

French is the worst things that happened to English.

Fun fact: Germans can’t say squirrels and English native speakers can’t say Eichhörnchen 🐿