Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
If you have not watched or listened to our previous podcast episodes, you might not know who I am.
I am an English teacher.
I have been teaching English online to students who are learning it as a second language for the past three years.
Over these past three years, I've had a lot of students and one of the things that I hear most, one of the complaints I hear the most from my students is that English is a difficult language to pronounce.
English is infamous.
Infamous means that it's famous but for a bad reason or for a negative thing.
And I would say that English is infamous for its difficult pronunciation.
In English, we have words that have silent letters.
We have words that are pronounced the same but are spelled differently.
We have words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently and it can all be very frustrating.
But don't worry. On today's episode, I am going to go over 10 tricky words that are difficult to pronounce, but I'm going to tell you how to pronounce them.
Now, one thing I have to say before we get started is that I speak with an American accent.
I am from California, specifically Southern California, and I think my accent is pretty neutral.
But I definitely have one and I definitely have a way that I pronounce words.
If you are trying to learn English from a different country, from the UK, from New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, just know that they can pronounce their words differently than I do.
And there's even areas in the United States that have a very different accent than I do.
So I'm going to go over the pronunciation for my accent, but just know it might vary depending on where you are.
So if you're interested in learning how to pronounce these 10 words with my American accent, follow along because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I just want to remind you to look in the description of this podcast episode.
You will find words and phrases like the word infamous.
So you can see their definition, take them into your own vocabulary learning system and start using them in conversation yourself.
Now, let's talk about these tricky words.
All of these words are going to have some component that makes it difficult to pronounce.
So I'm going to talk about the word, how it's spelled and how you should pronounce it, especially if you want to speak with my accent.
Our first word is a day of the week.
I think most of the days of the week are easy to pronounce in English except for this one.
You have Monday, Tuesday, and then all of a sudden you hit this weird day that is pronounced Wednesday.
Wednesday is not spelled how it is pronounced.
If you look at how Wednesday is spelled, it should be pronounced Wednesday.
Oh, that sounds weird, doesn't it?
That is not how we pronounce that word.
We have actually changed the pronunciation of this word over time because if you look at the spelling, there is a D there.
That D is not pronounced.
So when you are trying to say this word, do not pronounce that D.
Now, let's talk about how to pronounce this word if you're not pronouncing that letter D.
The first thing you want to do is you want to make this two syllables instead of three.
Like I said, if you look at the spelling, it should be wedness day, three syllables.
But we're not going to do that.
We're only going to make it two syllables to pronounce.
When we do the first syllable, we are going to say WENZ.
W -E -N and then kind of a S or a slight Z sound to the word WENZ.
Wednesday. Again, I know the D is in that word, but try to block it out from your vision.
Try not to focus on it and think of the spelling as being W -E -N -Z -D -A -Y, Wednesday.
Our second word is a month of the year.
So now we've talked about the most tricky day of the week to pronounce, and now we're going to talk about the most tricky month to pronounce.
Some of the months in English are relatively easy to pronounce.
You have April, May, June, July, all very simple, but there's one month that is pretty tricky and that is the month of February.
If you look at the spelling of February, you're going to notice two R's, but don't worry.
Let's go over how to pronounce it.
The nice part about February, even though it has those two R's in the spelling, the first R does not get pronounced, especially if you're speaking with an American accent.
Instead of pronouncing it February, that sounds very odd to me, we're going to pronounce it February.
The first part, the first syllable that we're going to do is the F -E -B part of the word, Feb.
That is the first syllable at the beginning of the word Feb.
Now the next syllable is going to be pronounced like I'm saying the letter U or I'm talking to you.
I'm talking to another person and I'm saying you, Y -O -U, you.
That's how we're going to pronounce that middle syllable.
Again, we are not going to pronounce the R that's at the beginning of that syllable.
We're just going to say you, Feb.
You, Feb. You, the first two syllables of this word.
Now the last syllable, think of the air around you, the air that you're breathing when you're breathing in.
That is how we're going to pronounce the end of this word.
There is the word Airy, the adjective Airy.
When we're describing something as being light, as something being in the air, we say airy, A -I -R -Y, Airy.
We're going to have that be our last syllable for this word and then we're going to put it all together, Feb.
You, Airy, February, February.
Practice that, break it down into the syllables, walk through it and see if you can pronounce it.
Let's continue on with our list and let's talk about another word that has some silent letters in it and it is Mortgage.
Now what a mortgage is, is when you buy a house, you get a loan from the bank to buy the house because usually houses are pretty expensive and then you pay every month.
You pay the bank a payment every month to repay the loan and once you've paid it all off, you officially own your home.
That loan that you get from the bank to buy your house is called a mortgage.
If you look at the spelling of the word, it is very different from how it's pronounced.
It is spelled like it should be pronounced Mort -Gage, M -O -R -T -G -A -G -E, Mort -Gage.
Now that's not how I've been pronouncing this word and that's not how you are going to pronounce it when you say this word in conversation.
What you're going to do is you're going to emit the T that's in the word, that Mort part of the word.
We're going to get rid of that T.
We're going to instead just say More, More.
Think about when you want more of something, the word M -O -R -E.
That's the sound that you're going to make for the first syllable of this word, More.
Now the second syllable, if you're hearing how I'm pronouncing this, sounds like an ij sound.
The beginning of the syllable, you do want to put a G sound.
You want the sound to come slightly from your throat, G -G.
Fill your throat and see if you're able to pronounce that vocalization of the G sound, G -G -G -G -G.
The i part is what we're going to use for our vowel, like an i, an ij sound when we're making the second syllable of this word.
And think of the ending like a soft G sound like an judge.
You're going to take all of that together to make the syllable gige.
Gige. Try to pronounce it right after me.
Gige. We're going to take these two syllables and we're going to make them into our word.
More, gige. More, gige.
Let's put it all together.
More -gige. Our next word is a little bit easier to pronounce, but it still has a silent letter.
And that is island.
An island is a body of land that is surrounded by water.
And if you look at the spelling of the word, it is spelled I -S -L -A -N -D.
So it looks like it should be pronounced is -land.
Is -land. That S that is in the word is not pronounced.
We are going to put the I at the beginning of the first syllable and think of your eyeball, the thing that you look at with.
That is the sound for this vowel at the beginning of this word, I.
Then the second part looks like it should be pronounced land.
So you should say I -land.
But that's not really what we do here in the United States.
That A sound, you could say I -land, but it just sounds kind of funny.
It sounds a little bit too much of that vowel sound.
If you've ever seen the movie Inglourious Basterds, there is a character that is played by Brad Pitt who has a very strong American accent, but almost too strong, kind of made to be a funny way of how he talks.
In the movie, he says the word Italian, but he says Italian.
Very strong on those vowel sounds.
And if you say I -land, that's what it reminds me of.
Too much of that A vowel sound.
We're not going to pronounce it that way.
Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to take that A vowel sound from land, and we're going to turn it into a slight schwa vowel sound, which means we're going to make it an uh, slight uh.
So instead of pronouncing it land, we're going to pronounce it land.
This schwa vowel sound can be tricky for students, but just think of it as more of a U than an A.
We're going to say Lund.
Lund. We're going to now put those together.
We're going to take our syllables and make our word I -land, I -land.
Put it all together, island, island.
The fifth word on our list also includes an R sound, an R constant sound, and the word is receipt.
A receipt is a piece of paper you get when you buy something.
It has the items that you bought and the price of them.
That is a receipt. It is spelled R -E -C -E -I -P -T.
That's a lot of vowels.
That's a lot of E and I letters.
Included with that R consonant sound makes it very tricky.
Let's break it down into the syllables so you can pronounce it.
The first part we're going to do is the first syllable, ree.
We're going to keep that R and E sound, ree.
The second syllable is where it gets tricky.
Don't really look at the spelling because if you look at the spelling, there is a P there.
We're not going to pronounce that.
Instead, think of the word for something that you sit on, a seat.
S -E -A -T, seat. That's the sound that we're going to make when we pronounce this.
Let's put it all together.
Receipt. Receipt. R6 is another word that just looks crazy.
If you look at the spelling, it is pneumonia.
Pneumonia. Pneumonia is spelled with a P as the first letter.
P -N -E -U -M -O -N -I -A. When you look at that, you would think that there would be a P sound of some kind as the constant sound to start the word.
That is not the case here.
When you look at this word, you're going to drop the letter P.
Now, what pneumonia is, is a type of illness when you are really sick and you have an infection in your lungs, that is pneumonia.
When we pronounce this, like I said, we're going to drop the P sound and for the first syllable, think of it like pronouncing the word new.
N -E -W when something is brand new.
That's how we're going to pronounce that first syllable.
New. The second syllable that we're going to pronounce is where we're going to put the stress of this word and that is the M -O part.
Mo. The last part of this is the ending and we're going to say, N -I -A.
N -I -A. Think of your knee part, the knee cap, the joint that you have in your legs and that's the sound that we're putting there.
N -U -M -O -N -I -A. The ending, even though it ends in an A, if you're listening to how I pronounce this, I'm not putting an A vowel sound, I'm putting that schwa sound again where it sounds more like a U pronunciation.
All together now, pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia.
There you go. The seventh word on our list is very subtle.
The word is spelled S -U -B -T -L -E.
If you look at it, it should be something like sub tile.
Again, when we look at the spelling, we're going to take out a letter and we're not going to pronounce it.
In this case, the letter is B.
Now, the meaning of the word subtle is that something is very not obvious.
Just a little hint of something.
You're not able to really see it right away because there's just a little bit of whatever that is present.
Think of if you're eating something and you just get a little hint of some flavor.
Maybe you can't really recognize it, but something's there.
You could say that the taste is very subtle.
It's not very extreme.
You don't get overwhelmed by it, but it's there just very lightly.
When we pronounce this word, we're going to break it down into two syllables.
Like I said, we are not going to pronounce the B that is in the letter.
Instead, we're going to start with the S sound and then we're going to put in that schwa vowel sound, that U vowel sound.
The first syllable is S.
S, that S sound with an S in the beginning.
Now, the second part of the word would be the T -L -E.
In some accents that are different from mine, they pronounce the T sound, so it'll be S -T -L, T -T, the T sound.
With my accent, I have to say that I don't do this.
There's one thing that makes a Californian accent unique and that is that we tend to drop the T sound and we tend to put it as a D sound.
So instead of saying, toll with a hard T, I usually say dole with a D sound.
Think of when something is not sharp, when it is a dole, like a dole -knife, D -U -L -L.
That's how I pronounce that second syllable.
Now, let's put it all together.
Saudel, Saudel. Our eighth word is going to be the thing that you use to cut with in your kitchen and that is knife.
Now, if you look at the spelling of this word, it is spelled K -N -I -F -E.
When we are pronouncing this word, what we're going to do is we're not going to pronounce the K.
We're going to start with the N part of this and the sound that we're going to use for the first part of the word is nigh.
Think of it like the opposite of daytime when it is nighttime.
Think of the word night, that N -I -G -H part of night, take off the T.
But that beginning part of the word, that's the same sound, nigh, nigh.
So that first part of the word, that's where you're putting your stress and that's when your jaw is going to be most open.
Now, the end of the word, we're going to put a slight F sound.
When you do this, what you want to do is you want your jaw to close and you're going to blow a little bit of air between your teeth so you can get that hint of that F sound there.
I'm going to do it so you can see if you're watching on YouTube.
If you're just listening, you're going to have to kind of practice on your own.
But if you're on YouTube, you're going to see how my mouth closes and I'm going to blow air through the front of my teeth to get that sound.
Now, I'm going to do a little bit more than I normally do just so you can get that sound and you can see what I'm doing.
But it would be like this, F.
Kind of a strange sound, that's what it is.
And now the word as a whole, knif, knif, knif.
Now, I saved the two most infamous examples for the very end, the two most famous examples of the difficult words to pronounce in English.
And so our ninth word is going to be rural.
Rural is spelled with two R's.
It is R -U -R -A -L. And that two R sound is very difficult for people to pronounce.
What rural is, is it's an area that's not as populated by people.
It doesn't have a lot of cities, it doesn't have a lot of towns, it doesn't have a lot of civilization.
It's more in the countryside.
That's what rural means.
Now, when you're trying to pronounce it, at least with an American accent, because I have to stress this, it is different for different countries.
With my accent, the sound that I use is like from the word earl.
An earl is someone who has a rank of nobility in the United Kingdom, and that word is spelled E -A -R -L, earl.
And that's the sound that I use when I pronounce rural.
You can hear that sound in the second half of this word.
There's also a TV show on that was called My Name Is Earl.
That was a TV show, I don't even know, maybe like 20 years ago that was popular here in the United States, and the character's name was Earl.
So I would say use that sound, use that pronunciation, when you are trying to pronounce the second part of this word.
Now, the first part of the word is very tricky, and it's very difficult for me to try to explain how to say this.
But we're going to use that R that's at the beginning of the word to try to pronounce this.
What we're going to do is we're going to close our jaw slightly, we're going to have our tongue floating in the middle of our mouth, don't have it touch the palate, don't have it touch the teeth, don't have it touch anything, and we're going to make a sound.
Again, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see how my jaw is pretty tight on this.
And how I can explain it, I think the best is if you're a Mandarin speaker, think of a Beijing accent, how they have that very R sound when they talk, it's coming from the throat, and that's where we want our sound to be produced here.
So we're going to say R, R, R.
That's the beginning sound that we're going to use and then we're going to transition into the Earl sound, that Earl sound at the end of the word.
Now the Earl, that ends with an L but it is a dark L sound.
So again, with your tongue, do not have it touch your palate, do not have it touch your teeth, it needs to be kind of floating in the middle of your mouth.
So we're going to do this one a couple of times because I know it's difficult.
Earl, Earl, Earl, Earl.
Keep practicing that one because I know it is tricky and I know it's a weird sound combination, but keep trying it, Earl.
And our last one is squirrel.
It has two Rs, it ends with a dark L sound, it is very similar to rural, our last one.
But the spelling is different.
If you look at the spelling, it is S -Q -U -I -R -R -E -L.
One last time, I have to say the American way of pronouncing this is very different from the British way.
When I heard someone from England pronounce this word for the first time, I could not stop laughing because it sounded very funny to me.
We pronounce it very differently.
One tip I'm going to give for this word, there is a movie from Disney that's called Up.
It came out a few years ago and if you have Disney Plus and you're struggling with this word, I'm going to send you there or at least I will put a link to a clip that you can play that has the pronunciation of this word because it is tricky.
In the movie Up, there is a dog who wears a collar and that collar speaks for them.
Anything that the dog thinks their normal barking would get turned into actual speech.
In the movie, the dog will see a squirrel run by and he goes squirrel.
If you just listen to that a bunch of times, that can help with your pronunciation hearing that constant input.
What we're going to do at the beginning of the word is we're going to pronounce that S sound.
We're going to do a little bit for that Q and the U and then transition to the Earl sound again with the dark L ending.
What this sounds like is squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
If you listen to me carefully, you can hear the S at the beginning and then the transition over the Q and the U into the Earl sound, squirrel.
Listen to that one as much as you can.
Watch the movie Up.
It's a wonderful movie.
Sad, heartbreaking, uplifting, everything.
But you're going to hear that word squirrel a bunch and that can help you with your pronunciation of that tricky word.
I hope you learned something from this episode.
I hope you learned how to pronounce these 10 tricky words.
Now, if you were struggling during it, please don't feel bad.
Don't get frustrated because these are tricky words.
I picked the most difficult words that I could think of.
If you had some difficulties, understand that that's completely normal.
But what you need to do is you need to go back and practice some more.
Go back, re -listen to this episode, practice along with me, and over time, you're going to get better and better with the pronunciation of these words.
If you liked this episode, if you want to go over more pronunciation tips, please let me know.
I have other words we could talk about, pronunciation tips we could discuss, but I don't know if you want that unless you tell me.
So leave a comment, tell me if this helped you, if there's other words you would like to practice, and just let me know so we can do that.
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