There are 1.3 billion English speakers around the world. The vast majority are using it as
a second language. English has become a lingua franca to communicate with each other. I live
in London and in one afternoon I could speak to an Italian barista, a Polish shop assistant
and a Brazilian taxi driver. And their English is generally amazing. So much better than my
Spanish. But speaking another language is really hard, right? You've gotta think of so many things.
Choice of vocabulary, choice of grammar, word order, stress, intonation, not to mention how do
you say this word or this word or this word? It's so hard, right? There's so much going on. Now the
reality of English communication today is that so much of it is done by people who have English as
a second language. And I've noticed that this can cause problems, particularly with pronunciation.
Confusion creeps in when sounds are missed and familiar words are said in unfamiliar ways.
Think about the context that you speak English in. Are you speaking to people who have English as a
first language? Or are you speaking to people who are just like you learning English? If you
come to London, the likelihood is that you'll be communicating with people from around the world,
and you need to know what pronunciation features to look out for. So in this epic lesson,
I've invited my Eat Sleep Dreamers to submit a video, teaching us one pronunciation feature
that speakers of their language find difficult in English. So for example,
if you know that many French speakers drop the H sound on words like hotel and hospital, then when
you are speaking to someone from France, you'll be much better prepared to understand them. Now,
just before we get going, guys, if you would like to receive my weekly newsletter ESD notes,
which has brand new lessons and bonus content, then you can sign up using the
link in the description below. Okay, let's get going with our first contributor, Samantha,
Hello Teacher Tom and hello everyone. My name is Samantha Daige and I'm from Lebanon.
And I want to share with you an interesting thing concerning Arab English speakers. First,
because the letter P does not exist in the Arabic alphabet we replace it with the sound B.
So instead of saying 'Paris', we say 'Baris' we also use the word 'bantalon' for trousers.
You might hear some of us say 'bizza', not 'pizza' or 'combuter',
not 'computer', or even 'Esbana' not 'Spain'.
So Egyptian find so many difficulties with English, sound such as P and B and that. So
let takes the word 'peach'. It begins with P and the sound kicks in with each,
each. So you must say 'peach'. What about apple? If you don't turn off your vocal cords
on the sound, it's going to be 'able'.
Okay, so Samantha and Muhammad are explaining that /p/ and /b/ variation. The fact that there is no
per sound in Arabic, so the /b/ is replacing it. So there's an area that perhaps we have to
adapt our listening to be aware that, okay, there could be this variation.
So we have to be aware that instead of 'Paris' is 'Baris', instead of 'pizza' it's 'bizza'.
Now often context will help us, of course, but sometimes it might not. Now,
of course not all Arabic speakers make this variation. It's simply that Samantha
and Muhammad have made this observation in a lot of Arabic speakers. Now, interestingly,
this pattern also exists in Vietnamese and we've got Hao here to explain it to us.
Hello everyone. My name's Hao. Today I'm going to talk about the words
containing the letter P and B, that many Vietnamese young learners find hard to pronounce.
Here are some common words, backpack, purple, happy,
pineapple, hippo. A lot of Vietnamese students say backpack, purple, hippo,
happy pineapple We really got struggle. We tongue twist, like have a happy birthday party poll.
I think we normally say 'Have a happy birthday party Polly'. Thanks for listening bye bye.
So we've got these plosive sounds causing some Vietnamese speakers problems as well. Backpack.
We had pineapple we had purple. So again, not, it's not impossible to understand them. No,
you can still kind of figure it out. And certainly in context, maybe we're in the
airport and they say I've lost my backpack. Okay. I know it's backpack, but sometimes
context doesn't help us. Okay. Let's go into Spanish and hear from Eat Sleep Dreamer Pablo
Hi, Eat Sleep Dreamers. This is Pablo from Madrid, Spain. And I like to teach you the
difference between two sounds that lots of Spanish speakers mispronounced or mix when
speaking English and these two sounds are the /dʒ/ sound and the /j/ sound which is called the yod.
The reason why we tend to confuse these sounds is that in Spanish, we've got a very similar sound
in words like 'yo', which means I and 'ella', which means she and in English, we've got loads
of examples like Jack, the, the name and a yak the animal, uh, a jet, which is an aircraft.
And, uh, yet the adverb. A Jew, which is a Jewish person and you the pronoun and a joke, which is a
funny story and a yolk, which is the yellow part of an egg. So in order to make the /dʒ/ sound,
we've got the tip of our tongue, just behind the hard ridge at the front of the top of mouth. And
to produce the /j/ sound we've got to raise the sides of our tongue to the roof of our mouth.
So I hope it's been useful, uh, by everyone and a big help for you, Tom.
Yes. This is one that I've really noticed in a lot of my Spanish students over the years,
this combination of /dʒ/ and /j/ and the kind of confusion between the two
we're using /dʒ/ when it should be /j/ and /j/ when it should be /dʒ/. So I remember a student
saying to me, yeah, 'Jess, I like it'. And I was like, who's Jess, why are you calling me Jess?
And they meant, yes. Also, uh, 'Tom I'm I'm yolking with you. I'm yolking with you'. Yolking
you're yolk egg yolk. Well, oh, joking with me. Oh, okay. So there is that confusion again,
of course not all Spanish speakers, uh, do this, but Pablo has definitely raised our awareness
so that when we're next speaking to a Spanish speaker, we can think, ah, I know what's happening
here the /j/ and the /dʒ/ get confused. Perfect. Okay. Let's move on to French. And Chelsy-Love
In French. The letter H is silent. So when we speak in English, we don't pronounce
the /h/ sound. Instead of saying 'high school musical' high school musical 'Hansel and
Gretel' it's 'Hansel and Gretal' 'happy birthday' happy birthday, Tom Holland, Tom Holland,
Harry Potter, and Harry Potter, hamburger hamburger, Prince Harry and Prince Harry.
Okay. So I mentioned at the top of the video that there's this /h/ dropping in French,
it's a classic feature, and I'm sure you've probably heard it, or you're aware of it. Uh,
Chelsy-love gave us some great examples, hotel, uh, Hansel and Gretal, uh, happy birthday,
Harry Potter. Very, very common. And of course, if you are aware of it, you know,
should be fine, right. And certainly context will help. Now, this reminds me of a story
about Charles de Gaulle, who was an iconic French figurehead. Uh, he was at a dinner with his wife,
and I believe his wife was talking to someone and they asked her, uh what's you
know, what, what are you looking forward to in the future? And she said 'appiness
and the person said, sorry, what? And she said 'appiness, and the person said, uh,
and then I think Charles de Gaulle lent over and went, my love I think it is pronounced happiness.
And she said, oh, quite different. But yes, the most important thing in life is 'appiness.
All right. Moving swiftly on. Oh, I just wanna quickly mention that this pronunciation feature is
not just French speakers. It's actually in British accents as well. So for example, in Cockney,
uh, in Mancunian, /h/'s are also dropped in a Yorkshire accent or some Yorkshire accents,
the /h/ is dropped. So this isn't just, uh, French speakers.
Actually, we find it here, people that, uh, speak English as a first language
might also drop that /h/ if you wanna know more about all the British accents or 20 of them,
at least I've got a video right here. You can check it out. Let's go to Koosha and Farsi.
Hello, I'm Koosha. I'm 22 years old. I'm from Iran. And I've been teaching English for quite
a while actually. And you know, the problem that most students have, especially at the beginning
is when they want to pronounce a noun or a verb or a word in general that starts with S and a
consonant. So a simple example would be the word student, instead of pronouncing it as they should
students, they would say 'estudent'. So they kind of add an extra E at the beginning or another one
study, instead of saying study, like I study every day, they would say I 'estudy'. So, yeah, that's
one of the main problems that the beginner students have, especially here in Iran. Bye!.
This is a really interesting feature that adding the vowel sound before the S so,
uh, you've got 'estudent' and you've got 'estudy'. I have noticed that in some
of my Iranian students over the years. I've also noticed an issue with the /v/ and /w/.
So 'vater', instead of 'water', 'vatched', instead of 'watched', now, this doesn't cause too many
problems, but you have to be aware of it. Okay. Let's jump to Tanzania where Simon is gonna talk
to us about Swahili. Speaker 8 (10:46):
Hello, Tom. My name is Simon Kubo from Tanzania in Arisha city. I'm a native speaker of Swahili.
And today I want to talk about the pronunciation mistake, which is made by Swahili speakers
when pronouncing the words with the diphthong /əʊ/
as in 'go'. Swahili speakers tend to use the monophthong /ɒ/ instead of that diphthong. Uh,
the reason for this mistake is that, uh, that it does not exist in Swahili language.
That's fantastic. Okay. So now we've dived into diphthongs, which is fascinating. A diphthong is
two vowel sounds together. So he's talking about the O sound O. Now he's saying that in Swahili
it's oh, so it's just a monophthong sound. So we're going from a diphthong, two vowel sounds
to a monophthong, one vowel sound. Um, so 'go' 'low' 'no'. So a 'no go area' would be a 'no go
area'. So not too difficult to understand, but you might find that familiar words are gonna be
pronounced in unfamiliar ways. And if you are trying to communicate with someone who, who
speaks Swahili, then this could be an issue. So really great that we know that this diphthong
now becomes a monophthong or can become a monophthong. Okay. Now we're moving on to Polish
and Agnieszka is gonna talk about two sounds that might cause them problems.
Hi, I'm Agnieszka and I'm from Poland. Uh, I think that Polish people struggle
with a long and short, uh, /i:/ like /i:/ and /I/ right. Um, in Polish,
you don't have this difference. So that's why maybe it is the case, but,
um, I can hear it, especially in pairs of words, like sleep and slip or, um,
cheap and chip, or maybe heat and hit, right? So that's the main difference. I think, seed and sit,
most Polish people would say 'six silly sisters are sweet to meet' where we put like a lot of,
uh, /i:/ sound, but, uh, the proper pronunciation would be 'six silly sisters are sweet to meet.'
Okay. The classic /i:/ and /I/ the long /i:/ vowel sound and the short /I/
This is a problem in many, many different languages. Um, it's the distinction between
that length of /i:/ and /I/. That Agnieszka demonstrates for us really, really well here,
that tongue twister is a classic one to help us differentiate between those two sounds. Now,
with this pronunciation issue, you do have to be careful because if you use the wrong sound,
you might say a bad word. So for example, the classic example, beach and bitch, okay. So the
beach where the sand, that's a of sand by the sea, and then bitch is a rude word for someone. So you
have to be careful. There's a couple of other examples. I've actually done a video all about
this. If you wanna watch that it's right here, but don't overthink it. Don't worry about it.
Just practise that long /i:/ and the short /I/,
this pronunciation feature does exist in lots of other languages. I know that lots of my
Spanish students and my Italian students have had issues with this, but there by no means the
only ones, lots of people have problems with this. Just practise that long and short sound, E E E E
a huge thank you to all the contributors for sending in their videos. My goodness,
you guys did a fantastic job. Thank you so much. Now, if you wanna learn more
about British English accents, you can click on this video here. And if you wanna learn
about British English vocabulary, you can click right here and I'll see you in the next video.