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Dorothee
Germany
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My boyfriend Jörn wants to become an English teacher – which makes sense considering that he was born to a British mother and a German father – and he already started by educating me. Depending on our mood and the situation we sometimes talk in German and sometimes in English, but whenever we talk in English he corrects me as soon as I mispronounce a word or make a grammatical error. We’ve been doing so for months now and thus the list has become quite long. I already made a small list:
Thought sounds exactly like fought, but I used to pronounce the “th” like some strange mixture of “s” and “f”.
Death and deaf sound just alike.
Though sounds like foe although I thought it was pronounced a tad differently.
Love – and I find it romantic that we talked about this subject and that he had to correct me here – sounds just like laugh.
Sew has a pronunciation equal to so.
I used to pronounce “individual” like I would pronounce the non-existent word “individyoual”, but thanks to my beloved Jörn I now know it is pronounced as if there was a “sh” between the “d” and the “u”.
“Thrown” is just like “frown”!
“Presence” rather sounds like “presents”!
I always thought for some reason I meanwhile don’t even understand myself that because of the “h” in “happening” it was always pronounced as “Thee Happening” while in reality “the” – also before the vocal of “h” – is pronounced just like the “the” in “there”.
I used to pronounce “flood” like “flud” instead of “flOOd”!
Thread and threat are pronounced a bit like the name Fred.
Oh my gosh! From Jörn I just learned that I must have spend all my life mispronouncing the words village, vile, violent etc. I thought that “vi” was pronounced like the French “oui”, while in reality it is pronounced like “wi”.
Now that he corrected me, I’m still rather insecure. Is this a pronunciation only typical of people who live in the area his mother came from or is it common to all English native speakers? I decided to post this here as it would be nice – I think – if native speakers or people who have been living in an English-speaking country for a while could reply and tell me if they think that pronouncing these words this way is typical of more than just one region in Great Britain. Thanks a million!
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