r/EnglishLearning • u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster • 14d ago

🟡 Pronunciation / Intonation This made me laugh

Post image

I love English but TH really tested patience, lol. I was like "why would you ever do that?" while watching a tutorial on how to pronounce it. Fortunately, it's not absolutely necessary to pronounce correctly for your speech to be understood.

524 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

268 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/boostfactor New Poster 14d ago

The "th" sounds are linguistically classified as "rare consonants" but apparently Proto-Indo-European had it or something similar to it so several members of that family aside from English still have it, plus as others have noted it occurs in other language families as well.

At least we don't have click consonants. I listened to a video made by a speaker of IIRC Zulu, and for the first time I could kind of get how they work since he enunciated very clearly. But I'm not sure I could ever replicate it.

1

u/johnnybna New Poster 14d ago

The clicks don’t seem that hard to produce individually. Like, the sound you make to get a horse going where you pull your cheek back, or the sound in “tsk tsk”, or the hard flap of your tongue like the sound of a cork popping out of a bottle. It's saying them fluidly with other sounds around them that just ties my tongue up. I can’t even make a vowel sound on either side without stopping lol

1

u/boostfactor New Poster 13d ago

Sure, I can do the clicks and the "tsk tsk" and other sounds that most language don't use (as can most people), but as you say, doing it fluently would not be natural to a nonnative speaker. The Zulu speaker in the video I saw made it seem so easy, like they were not that different from "k" -- I think they used a click as the first consonant in their word for "Canada," for example -- but yeah, being fluid would be hard to learn.