Respuestas
1. English has one of the biggest, trickiest vocabularies ther in any language, but it’s fair tare some of the reasons why
English has an unusually large and varied number of words.
English has a vast number of words – the biggest of any language, according to some scholars. It’s a particularly complex lexicon because it has many different roots and influences, including Old English and Latin, which means that there’s huge variety in how words are spelled. What’s more, there are numerous instances of words meaning essentially the same thing, but with subtle differences that are often lost on those who don’t speak English as their mother tongue. For example, the words “plump” and “fat” both mean basically the same thing, but their connotations mean that they can’t necessarily be used interchangeably (“plump” tends to imply a healthy roundness, as in a plump baby or a plump roast chicken, while “fat”
Idioms and slang
Image shows sailors with bales of rope
Another difference between English and some other languages is the number of consonants it’s possible to group together in a syllable – up to three; “stranger”, for instance, has three consonants (“str”) strung together before the vowel “a”. This is not possible in some other languages, and it can lead to difficulties in pronouncing it, with some students inadvertently inserting extra vowels to break up the consonants. With this, as with anything, practice makes perfect. Those struggling long-term with English pronunciation may benefit from elocution lessons, which coaches students through how to create different sounds by using the mouth, teeth and tongue in a different way.
You can’t always guess the pronunciation from the spelling
Just as it’s not always possible to guess the spelling of a word based on how it sounds, pronunciation of already difficult sounds is made harder by the fact that it’s often hard to guess how a word is pronounced based on its spelling. Let’s look at an example to illustrate this. You’d be forgiven for thinking that because they all end in the letters “-ough”, the words “cough”, “tough”, “through”, “thorough”, “bough” and “dough” would all sound the same when spoken aloud. Not so. Each of these words is pronounced differently. The “-ough” sound in “cough” sounds like “off”; in “tough” it sounds like “uff”; in “through” it sounds like “oo”; in “bough” it sounds like “ow”; in “dough” it sounds like “oh”.
Unfortunately, there’s no substitute here for simply learning the individual pronunciations; with no hard-and-fast rules dictating the pronunciation of words ending in “-ough”, it’s a labour-intensive series of words to learn. Luckily, not all word endings are as difficult to learn as this one; words ending in “-tion”, for instance, are all pronounced “shun”. This means that for most of the standard endings, you only need to rote-learn the exceptions where pronunciation is concerned.
There are so many silent letters
Image shows two knights about to fight with a castle in the background.
A knight at a castle has a remarkable number of silent letters.
English has lots of silent letters that aren’t pronounced, which gives EFL learners even more pronunciation issues to contend with. An obvious example is words that begin with a silent “K”, such as “knife” or “knock”. There are also other silent letters at the beginning of words, such as the silent “H” at the beginning of “honour”, the “p” at the beginning of “psychology” or the “G” in “gnome”. Less obvious are words that contain or end in silent letters rather than beginning with them. Examples include the “G” in “benign”, the “B” in “thumb”, the “H” in “character”, the “N” in “autumn” or the “T” in “castle”. It’s usually possible to learn the patterns containing silent letters so that you can hazard a guess as to whether a letter should be pronounced, but it’s sometimes a question of trial and error: if you pronounce a letter that shouldn’t be pronounced, the person you’re talking to will almost certainly tell you!
Regional dialects alter pronunciation
English pronunciation is made even more difficult by the plethora of regional dialects that mean that the same word can be pronounced very differently depending on who’s saying it. A good example is the way the “a” is pronounced in the word “bath”; there’s a broad north-south divide between those in southern England, who pronounce it with a long “a” to