I love Japanese pronunciation. It tends to make sense, with very few weird exceptions.
What I hate about Japanese are the particles (O, Wo, Ga, Wa), which the best explanation I’ve ever gotten from dozens and dozens of native speakers is “It sounds wrong when you use the wrong one, and it sounds right when you use the right one.”
Oh, and the conjugation-based-on-social-class. That’s just idiotic. All languages have idiotic elements (gender in Romance languages, words-spelt-the-same-meaning-different-things or words sounding the same meaning different things in English, the utterly baffling “shi” in Mandarin that is pronounced “sh-uuuh” instead of “sh-eee” like it should be… and so on), and that’s Japanese’s one.
Watashi wa Quria desu. Ori wa Ma-ru-ke. Boku wa oresama.
And so on.
Canadians have a weird habit of dropping syllables (Yonge = “young”, Toronto = “Tuh-ran-ah”) and some utterly baffling pronunciations without justification (About = “aboot”, Cards = “kerds”).
EDIT: Corrected the way we pronounce “about” to non-Canadian ears. To us it sounds like Americans say “Ab-hout,” but again, language is weird.
SECOND EDIT: I forgot about a personal, hyper local example! There is a street in Kitchener/Waterloo that is spelled “Weber” and pronounced “Wee-bur”, but the line of BBQs made by Weber are pronounced “Web-er.” Utterly baffling, and none of them can explain why but everyone I know who was raised in the area insists on the Wee-bur pronunciation for the street.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
And even if written English has traps, the UK also has enough accent variations that just make everything impossible. Learn English as a second language and then move to Newcastle? Good luck.
I feel like English at least has an excuse for being weird by being a franken-language deriving from various people invading, asking locals “what’s that?” and then just writing down whatever.
(And then more stuff got added via the same process, but with us as the invaders.)
French has a fancy committee for setting their language rules and they’re still wandering about deciding tables need genders.
We have a number of children’s books published by Usborne, a publishing company with a good number of UK authors it seems.
There are some rhyming words in them that I can understand how they are supposed to rhyme, but don’t because of differences between American and English; but there are some that I cannot fathom – maybe the next time I run across some, I’ll take note of them and post them here, to see if anyone can confirm or deny the rhyme.
I think it’s generally accepted, but may not be universally known, that if you didn’t hear certain speech distinctions growing up you don’t develop the ability to notice them at all (unless you go and live there, and then it takes ages). Vowel sounds are particularly subject to this.
Hmm. Oversimplification on my part (or I’m using the wrong terms… probably both).
“Yonge” should be pronounced “Yah-on-juh”, but is pronounced “Yon-guh.” Toronto should be pronounced “Tor-on-toe”, and is instead pronounced “Toh-an-nah” or “Tor-an-ah” depending on who you are talking to. Occasionally “T-dot,” “Hogtown,” or “The GTA.”
I’m sure you didn’t post that looking for a Japanese lesson, but nevertheless, here’s my quick and dirty particle guide:
Ha (sounds like wa): after subject/topic
Ga: after new/unknown subject, before a “can” verb
Wo (sounds like o): before other verbs
He (sounds like e)/ni: before destinations, this one yeah, too many specifics to go into which is correct
To type on my phone I usually swipe which keeps impressing some of my friends because they just thumb-type everything? Today I am happy to report I swiped my so far longest word on first attempt:
Lieblingsgeschmacksrichtung
I am surprised that the keyboard even knew this was a word as I could have sworn I made it up… I was asking a friend what type of cake I should get her. So that means “what is your favorite flavor range”. Geschmack is flavor and adding richtung broadens the word to mean a whole range of flavors… and Lieblings is just a prefix that means favorite. So a possible answer would have been “something citrus” or “berries” or chocolaty but probably not “that one specific hazelnut milk cake they have”
Ah, broken up like that even makes sense… This brings me terrible memories of trying to read directions for a small village in Germany while driving in the middle of the night…
"What was that sign??
“No idea, it was 17 hundred letters long…”
Direct Translation: “special curl” (curl as in tress of hair)
Pronounciation Note: the final ‘e’ is spoken as an “uh” sound kind of.
Meaning: We say “Die Abteilung braucht mal wieder eine Sonderlocke” - “that department needs yet another special treatment”
In code this means we program a piece just for one very special case that should not need different treatment but someone wants it despite that.
It is also used to signal that someone/some organization is doing something different from everyone else. It is often suggested that this special treatment is without necessity causing extra work for everyone else and making things more complicated.
There are also a lot of other words you can prefix with “Sonder-” to give them that “Special” meaning. (Sonderrolle, Sonderstatus, Sonderfall, Sondervorrauszahlung, Sonderweg, Sonderkommando)
Other words with the same basic word “stem” are
sonderbar – weird
sonderlich – odd or eccentric
Sonderling – an eccentric person, or a cranky person
besonders – extra or special (adverb, usage “besonders gut/schlecht” → especially good/bad)
