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What English sounds do you struggle with?

smol_but_hungry
Hi! I will be teaching my first English class to adult immigrants starting next week, and I'm planning on including some minimal pairs work to help familiarize my students with challenging English phonemes. If you are an English learner, I'd love to know: \- What English sounds do you have the hardest time saying/recognizing? Are there any words in particular that give you a lot of trouble? \- What is your native language? \- What was most helpful to you when you were a beginner? \- Any other things that you'd want a teacher to know so they could give you a great experience! Thanks in advance for the help!

10 comments

kekiklizeytinyagi
“th” sound is the biggest problem I think. I’am Turkish. I tried several English teachers and can say that the teacher must be prepared before the lesson and can manage every second of it. Students shouldn’t be bored.
weddit_usew
engliSH Sounds. The quick switch from SH to S sound.
MizuStraight
dunno if it counts as a word but Massachusettes
New_Entrepreneur_191
My native language is hindi I struggle with: •Th sound voiced and invoiced as in thing and that.(Hindi has dental stops not dental fricatives) •Zh sound as in leisure I can pronounce but I really have to make a very conscious effort:- •Sh sound as in Tissue because while Hindi does have Sh , my dialect of Hindi does not. •Alveolar stops(Hindi has dental and postalveolar stops) •æ vowel , it's too fronted , have to stretch my mouth a lot more than I'm used to Also Hindi is a language which is syllable toned, so figuring out word stress and sentence stress in English is really difficult for me.
Antique-Canadian820
Z and sometimes S. I have a lisp
Ritterbruder2
I struggle with the rhotic r in American English. It affects my pronunciation of nearby sibilant sounds too (s and sh): they come out as retroflexed. I spoke Norwegian before learning English, but I learned English at a young enough age to be considered fully native. I came from trilled-r’s.
Forward-Ant-9554
belgian. th. we might press the tongue against the upper teeth but don't slip the tongue underneath it. we;re not used to it and even after being told, we forget. so a third and a turd can sound the same. unfortunately, teeth will come out as teet as well. lol. and the vowels are always "somewhere in between" for us. we have very "pure" (from our perspective, and i don't know how to explain it better) o and a. there seem to be a lot of words where the o is somewhere in between. same with the u in words like "but". if it was a dish, i would say it is between a "u" (like in "upper") and an "a". it is difficult for us where exactly to find the sound on the slide between our pure vowels. i learned a lot watching neighbours with english captions for the hearing impaired. it was a soap that didn't take place in one industry (like fashion or hospital) that had characters of various ages and a variety of storylines. so they talked about all sort of subjects. great for vocabulary. the most difficult part of listening is knowing where words stop and begin. you can't look something up in your vocabulary if you don't know what the word is. captions clearly isolate the words. and you constantly get the link between writing and pronounciation. which is a challenge in english.
StarWoxBaby
Hello, the hardest around for me is "the" It's really for me(if you have some tips or something like pls write under my comment)
Crafty-Photograph-18
My most problematic sounds are the vowel minimal pairs. Specifically: /ɑː/ and /ɒ/ ; /ʊ/ and /uː/ ; /e/ and /æ/ ; /ɔ:/ and /ɒ/ I will pronounce words with them correctly when I put conscious effort, but I might mess up when talking spontaneously
EasyKaleidoscope6436
As a native Italian speaker I've always struggled with the word "sixths", personally.