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Comment by mateo1 | Hacker News Reader

>My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language.

I definitely agree on this one. At a previous stage of my life I'd read a lot of text in English and never spoke a word of it. I sorta had this self-emergent mostly subconscious way to map English words to sounds in a way that preserved the spelling information without being too dissimilar from the real pronunciation.

Of course the whole system proved to be quite problematic when I eventually had to start speaking in English on a daily basis.

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I can relate to this experience. I have since worked on my pronunciation extensively, trying to expose myself to spoken English as much as possible (which nowadays with Netflix & sons is so much easier than 20 years ago). But since I learned to read English at such a young age, I can never "undo" the way I internally pronounce/read the words - I have just learned a second "overlay language" that maps my internal sound of all the words to their 'correct' pronunciations (those that are recognizable by someone who speaks English natively.)

The funny thing is, in my current work project there is a colleague who can clearly read & write English without any effort, but his pronunciation is "zero effort given". The other day, I chuckled on the way he pronounced the word "queue", which is exactly how I pronounce it myself "in my head" before I map it to the 'correct' English pronunciation. I think everybody understood what he meant, but his total disregard for the 'correct' English pronunciation rules is admirable.

After years of speaking English, I try to do what your friend does. I'll never learn how to speak "cucumber" properly.

I just started to watch all movies in English whenever I can, this helped me a tremendous amount.

But occasionally, it happens that I still get it wrong. For example, just a few weeks back, I've heard 'Arkansas' pronounced in the News - totally different than I would have pronounced it. I know how to pronounce 'Kansas', and I was always under the impression that 'Arkansas' is the same with an 'Ar-' prefixed, which is apparently not the case.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread: https://youglish.com/ is absolutely brilliant to figure out how something is pronounced, saved me quite a few times already of mispronouncing things.

I'm a native English speaker, but not from the USA, and I'd heard Arkansas spoken out loud and written down separately for over a decade before I understood they were the same place. And my first thought when I realised this - even as a native English speaker - was incredulity at how mind-bogglingly stupid that was.

You know, before I took 30 seconds to come up with a handful of other inconsistent pronunciations and begrudgingly concede that it wasn't any weirder than a lot of other inconsistencies I'd already absorbed without really realising it.

Yep. I follow the advice in the article:

> NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound.

Because on probably a monthly basis my partner will make fun of me for pronouncing something wrong. The phrase is "I learned it from reading" --but it's not a good enough excuse anymore in our wide web'd world.

Oh, and I've spoken American English since birth, and have been variously told my language and communication skills are very strong.

> I know how to pronounce 'Kansas', and I was always under the impression that 'Arkansas' is the same with an 'Ar-' prefixed, which is apparently not the case.

The reason why they're pronounced differently is that they have different language origins. Arkansas is from the plural form of the French name of a Native American tribe, so you don't pronounce the '-s' while Kansas comes from the English spelling of a similar(?) tribe, where the '-s' is pronounced. English is notorious for just borrowing words from other languages wholesale but it seems to work most of the time.

Place names are notorious for this in English. Family names too, sometimes.

Honestly though, mispronouncing words is a rite of passage for ordinary native English speakers too, especially ones who acquired a large chunk of their vocabulary from reading.

England is well known for this. I live close-by to a town called Gotham.

It is pronounced goat-em.

Other nearby places include:

Loughborough, pronounced luff-bruh

Leicester, pronounced less-ter

Derby, pronounced Dar-bee

Yeah, you might have a hard time understanding how many times I’ve heard my own last name pronounced incorrectly by people who are clearly Native American English speakers. And from a name that goes back to at least the 1600s in the “Domesday Book” from England.

It wasn’t until Beyoncé became a thing that some people started getting it right. And even then, I’ve still had to prompt them — “you know, like Beyoncé?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOd3lwluQIw

> But occasionally, it happens that I still get it wrong. For example, just a few weeks back, I've heard 'Arkansas' pronounced in the News - totally different than I would have pronounced it. I know how to pronounce 'Kansas', and I was always under the impression that 'Arkansas' is the same with an 'Ar-' prefixed, which is apparently not the case.

This example also happened to me (native British English speaker), mistakes will be made if you don't hear how a word is pronounced.

Another example: If you know how to pronounce "in" and "famous", you still don't know how to pronounce "infamous".

I learnt it from the news during the Clinton years. Took quite a while to make the connection. You can add on Tucson to that list as well.

Tucson was originally a Spanish town, and its name in Spanish (Tucsón) is pronounced probably more similar to how you expect. Not sure why the “c” became silent in English.

Wow, that website is super useful, didn't know, thanks.

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