Microblog Memes

This is 100% my girlfriend, and I take great pleasure in never correcting her, I find it charming.

As someone who has learned the English language primarily by reading thousands of books, I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, English pronounciation sucks big time.

The one that I mispronounced for awhile was hyperbole. I thought it was pronounced like "hyper bowl."

laughs in a language that makes sense phonetically

I always knew that "misled" in books (pronounced mīzulled) and the spoken "misled" (mis-led) meant the same thing, but it took me until high school to figure out that mīzulled was only in my head.

The english language badly needs an orthography reform

Not me! I only read audiobooks, so I know how to pronounce all those $5 words!

(Just don't know what they mean or how to use them)

Simple, just read your books in IPA. Tæps ˈtɛmpᵊl

I said "miss happen" one time in front of my girlfriend. "What?"

"You know, like badly shaped, deformed."

"Misshapen?! BAH HAH HA HAA!"

I grew up reading Warner Bros comic books my grandma had and thought Yosemite Sam was pronounced "Yosemight". Eventually figured it out. Later my backpacking buddy and I were looking at a map of California when he told me we should check out "Yosemight" if we ever get around to visiting Yosemite

Some names would also throw me for a loop. When I first heard how they said "Hermione", I was quite flabbergasted.

As someone whose father had a doctorate in English, I grew up reading and being told off every time I mispronounced a word.

in-ter-MINE-able / in-TERM-in-able

Is one that jumps to mind which I still cock up to this day, I feel a little called out 😂

Spanish would never pull this BS on you.

Also... fuck the cobbled together mess that is English.

Edit: some of it is regional pronunciations too

Trebucket

Reading through Lovecraft's (especially his earlier) work be like, "Hey Google! Define cacodaemoniacal.."

You're gonna need to know what gambrelled roofs and gables are too. Dude loved his gambrells and gables.

I did this, and grew up in a ESL English only house,I pronounce so many words wrong with a perfect American accent.

Bunch of y'all didn't watch TV with the captions on or movies with subtitles.

Soft "ch" chimera just makes more sense to me.

Metrocity

I feel like this is especially true for English since it seems to me there are no spelling rules that convey pronunciation. You can have 2 words spelled completely the same save from one letter and the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.

I'm not sure how this is in other languages, but in my native german (which is always said to be difficult to learn) when you understand the spelling rules you can always assume the correct pronunciation of a word. Certain letter combinations always amount to the same way of pronouncing it.

I guess this is because both languages started out in the germanic language family, but over the course of history english adapted way more from other languages and just made them their own. Including differences in spelling, but maybe not as much pronunciation. Best example is "Bologna", which is still the italian/latin spelling, but no one near italy would call it "Baloney" .

I'm always amazed at how native speakers learn to write things like that, since you cant count on what you hear at all.

As a French Canadian moving from Quebec to Ontario, that struggle was real.

My English learning process was me being a eight year old kid who wanted to play diablo. No clue about shit. Barely able to read in the first place and just going from one word which is similar to one in my native language to the next similar one. Like "ok, intelligence looks a lot like intelligenz. Dexterity makes my bow do more damage so it should be something like speed or whatever" so basically trial and error over the years. The pronunciation was accordingly. As an example, strength was "stren g t hö". Not sure how I'm supposed to write what i said back then xD Still to this day from reading and such and not practicing enough speaking English some are way off.

I call this being bookish, pronounced "bockish"

Jokes on you, I pronounce most of words in English wrong, because no one bothered to teach me proper pronunciation at school.