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As a native English speaker who is hard of hearing, I can echo his pain with phonetics. I learned most of English from reading and writing, and I say a lot of words incorrectly. People I am talking to that do not know me well often treat me as if I am retarded.

I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.

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English is my third language; I've read and written English almost every day for 30 years, but I've only ever spent two weeks in English-speaking countries. I sometimes find myself unable to pronounce words that I've used for decades in writing – often, it's the type of more formal vocabulary that doesn't often come up in movies or TV series. For instance: cuticle, paean, echelon, emaciated, heinous, comely, disreputable, hearth, dearth, contumely, beatify, subsequent, etc.

English is my first language, I've spoken it all of my 33 years, and I am an Engineer.

I have no idea what "contumely" means, or how to pronounce it. You're doing great :)

contumely means an insult, it almost exclusively comes up in Shakespeare. 99% of people on the street would not know that word

I'm guessing 99% of people wouldn't know what "beatify" meant either, and a significant number would think it was a typo for "beautify". Those two words also rather nicely express the vagaries of English pronunciation (the latter is pronounced to rhyme with "pew", the former "bee-A...", which almost feels like it deserves a diaeresis, except we don't do those in English).

I leave the gentle reader with the English place name Beaulieu, which probably isn't pronounced anything like you'd expect, or how it should be.

There's a lot of Catholics out there. They might not know how to spell it, but most of them would know what beatify is about. To be fair, beatify is more 'Catholic jargon' and less 'standard English' - I wouldn't expect anyone unfamiliar with Catholicism to know it.

As for names, my favourite wtf is Featherstonehaugh, pronounced fan-shaw. Then there's Chalmondley (chum-lee)...

If you use Chromium (or Google Chrome), you can use this extension. It has helped me greatly with my pronunciation.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/english-dictionary...

"heinous" is featured in every episode of Law & Order: SVU.

Yeah, its in the intro:

"In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad, known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories."

Vicious is another word I want to pronounce wrong if I see it in writing.

I think often English speakers have a similar but opposite problem - they are used to speaking words but when you come across them in writing you cant recognize them. The "typical" examples of this are gazebo and hyperbole.

I also think only very educated and well read people would know what half those words mean or how to pronounce them.

kyoo-tih-kul, pee-uhn, esh-uh-lon, eh-may-she-ay-ted, hey-nuhs, cuhm-ly, dis-reh-pyoo-tah-bul, hahrth, derth, kuhn-too-muh-ly, bee-at-if-iy, sub-seh-kuent

Haha, that is helpful only if you already know how to pronounce English.

While intuitive for English speakers, this notation (don't know what it is called like) is actually discouraged because it is not even able to unambiguously describe English pronunciation...

(The alternative is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which after getting used to it is not that hard to master)

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

[…]

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos

Further notes:

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/e/pronounc.htm

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