I believe most of us have ever mispelling or mispronounce some words.
Actually I didn’t think I would mispronounce. But I might get influence from my local classmates.
For example: In chinese Ānjìng (安静) was pronounce as anjing = dog (in Indonesian) with my classmates.
Or maybe the wrong tones like 人 (rén) is human, but with different tone it’s different meaning like you spell it with 2nd tone it become 忍 (rěn) is bear; endure; tolerate.
Sometimes you might hear something hilarious because they speak with different tone. That’s for chinese. Are the other languages like that?
@Sica_GorJess This is very true! If you use the wrong tone, the word completely changes. Sometimes native speakers talk so fast that parts of a word blend together, but when you actually spell it you realize it’s a little different. English can be tricky because the rules for certain letters depend on how it’s spelled or used, such as que in “question” vs. “antique.”
What about the rest of you? Please share other examples too!
I always sing along with Kpop and of course that comes with my own made up Korean. It’s getting better but I think it’s best to not sing along with Kpop when Koreans, or anyone else since I can’t sing but for concerts I don’t care, within hearing distance. And my English is not always fluent either. And as @dee mentions for some words I’m not sure how to pronounce a certain letter combination properly because I never heard how to pronounce it. I can’t think of a example right now but not so long ago I heard a word and I had no idea what it meant until I saw it written. Talking about meant I sometimes keep writing “ment” or “wierd” for “weird” hurray for spellings check.
I remember me and my family where a bit lost in Wales during a holiday so I went to look for a name plate of a place/street, I found one. Dad goes “well how is it called?” “No idea how to pronounce it but with a lot of “L”'s in the beginning… look for yourself.” I mean how on earth am I supposed to pronounce places like “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll” (googled one for an example) ?!" Now we always make a picture of the nameplate of the street and the parking where our car is parked when we go on holiday so we can show people instead of pronouncing it.
I wanted to post this somewhere else but I think it fits this topic perfectly too.
On youtube there is some sort of Bassie & Adriaan challenge going on where people try to sing a bit of the intro.
I don’t get it, it’s really old. I loved to watch them when I was little so why is there a hype just now?! Ohh well it’s cool that some try to speak Dutch
This is how you should pronounce it (to bad I can’t find an other version…I guess they deleted it all) :
http://youtu.be/q219rQ-esUY
And this is how someone else does sing it and it started a whole challenge/hype around it:
http://youtu.be/KIOToHcrJlg
If you want to give it a try here is the official Karaoke version
Words which I’ve frequently read but never actually spoken get me all the time. I remember the first time I said “queue” (as “kyu-wi” instead of “kyu”). It was so embarrassing! Actually, even words I’ve said tons of times I’ve learned I was mispronouncing… my name, Mazza, being one! Finally a kind Italian pronounced it, helping to settle our family debate.
In Korean, I have issues with the plain, tense, and aspirated consonants. I have to put in a lot of effort so I don’t say 살 (sal - e.g. flesh) instead of 쌀 (ssal - rice). And trying to write down words with these consonants from hearing them is even worse! But tone languages really seem so much more difficult. I took a phonetics class where I had to pronounce different tones and I felt like the teacher was always telling me, “Well, it’s not like that. It’s more like this…”
I laughed over the Llanfairpwllgwyngyll example @Dudie. I love that it came down to taking a picture of the nameplate because that’s how hard it is! This is the first time I’ve seen Bassie & Adriaan challenges but I bet they are especially funny to watch knowing the real words.