6.1 Individual research

-Why is English so hard to pronounce?

During this research assignment I will be focusing on finding out why foreigners find English so hard to pronounce and which parts of the language cause this phenomenon.

I chose this topic because I am always very aware of the sounds I make when pronouncing English words and sentences, but also of the pronunciation of others.

 

• The difficulty of proficiency

The English language is a relatively easy language to learn. Compared to Chinese, Japanese and Russian, English has a very clear structure and, especially for users of the roman alphabet, the language does not take a lifetime to master. Yet many foreigners have trouble with pronunciation. 

 

English is generally recognized as a lingua franca and is taught in many countries around the world. Many people might also find that reaching a level of intermediacy requires very little studying and only about a year of intensive education. The English language is relatively easy to learn, up to a certain point. 

 

Once a students has reached a level of intermediacy and communication goes pretty well, the level of proficiency seems hard to reach.  Advanced grammar is quite tricky since it deals with numerous complicated conditional and modal constructions. But the hardest parts seem to be all those strange sayings and expressions natives use and, ofcourse, pronunciation.

 

2. Written vs. spoken English

The English language pronunciation is so difficult because the written form does not resemble the spoken form very closely. For example, silent letters like- R, L, B, H, N, K, T, S, P and W. Yet they are not silent all the time. Sometimes they are pronounced and sometimes they are not, depending on the word. Then there are letters like S, T and N, which can be pronounced a number of different ways. An -S can be pronounced /z/, A -T can become 5 different sounds and an -N can also be pronounced as /m/ or /ŋ/. 

 

The vowels can create even more confusion. English vowels have 19 different sounds spread out over 5 different vowels (a, i, e, o, u). So no wonder people get confused about how to pronounce ‘good’, ‘food’ and ‘blood’. (/ʊ/, /u:/ and /ʌ/)

 

 

3. Pasting sounds together

Once someone has mastered all those different sounds of consonants and vowels, they have to be joined together to make new sounds and words. In English, it is very important to the meaning of a word that different sounds are joined together correctly. English has a couple of different ways to join words; assimilation (2 sounds that change each other), elision (one sound disappears/becomes silent), vowel + vowel joining (an a/r/,/j/w/ is added between sounds), and consonant + vowel joining (a consonant joins the next syllable). 

 

Sometimes, these joined pairs can be quite strange, like ‘law and order’. Even though it is spelled with a ‘w’, it is pronounced as ‘law_r_and_order’.

 

4. Weak/strong structure

English pronunciation consists of weak and strong sounds. By far the most common sound in English is the “schwa” sound /ə/ – which should be pronounced roughly one in every three vowel sounds. However, the schwa is impossible to see on the written page. In order to see the “schwa” one has to listen very closely to when it is pronounced.

Lots of words can be pronounced either way, depending on their place in the sentence and the words and sounds surrounding them. Quite logically, this gives foreign learners quite the challenge.

 

5. Intonation and stress

The English are famous for saying one thing and meaning the other- using intonation and stress to give a different meaning to a sentence. These subtle clues can get lost in translation to a learner of English. English people use quite a large range of pitch and four different patterns. -fall, fall-rise, rise, and rise-fall. 

The rules of English stress are simple to learn but nearly impossible to see in a written sentence. And since many languages use different intonation and stress structures for sentences and meaning, the rules of the English intonation and stress might be lost on some students. If a learner of English is misunderstood, it would more often be because of misplaced intonation or stress than incorrect pronunciation. This is why stress might be the most important aspect of clear speech.

 

6. Conclusion

Natives sometimes complain about how foreigners are not trying their best at learning the English language. We can, ofcourse, write this off as misunderstanding or ignorance of someone’s situation and sometimes even racism. We should consider looking into the English language mechanics more often before we judge people on their ability to make themselves understandable in English. The English language can be quite hard to master and sometimes even impossible depending on a learner’s mother tongue. The English language has more complicated structures than we initially realise and we should appreciate the hard-working learners of the English language.