“Facade” caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I’ve learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I’m like “Holy heck THAT’S how you spell carrot??” Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it’s still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
When I was learning Japanese, I came across a sentence along the lines of “lets buy stuff at the <shoppingumouru>”, I could understand most of it fine, but didn’t recognize bracketed word, which was conveniently written in a script that denotes loan words (and I have trancscribed phonetically above). I probably spent at least half an hour trying to look up “shoppingumouru” simce I couldn’t find it in my dictionary. Eventually, I turned to Google translate and immediately facepalmed when I saw the answer.
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in India) a few years ago. I learned the script quickly and one day walking through the capital of Thiruvananthapuram I saw a van with the word “POLICE” and then the Malayalam word underneath it. I was all excited to learn a new Malayalam word without needing my tutor, until I sounded it out and realized it was just “POLICE” written with the Malayalam script.
Fun fact: Malayalam is the only language whose named is a palindrome. Its English name, at least - in the Malayalam script it’s not.
When learning Spanish I read in a book that skateboarding was montar en monopatin. In college I spoke that in oral exam. My professor was like what the fuck is that?
Is it shopping mall?
Yes! Japanese is a phonetic language and loan words are just phonetisized versions using the syllables (sounds) they have in their alphabet. The katakana version of their alphabet is for just for loan words, onomatopoeias (moo, meow, woof), and other things that are not words. Katakana symbols just represent sounds, not meanings.
I still have to “translate” that one in my head every time I read it.
Same!
And I definitely read it out loud in front of a class in high school the wrong way.
An-tea-queues
And rather ironically:
Kway instead of Queue --8th grade substitute teacher caught me on that one while reading aloud.
Ha - and yet “quay” can be pronounced as “kway”, or “kay” or “key” - and mean the same thing - depending on context. Mostly if it’s part of a name, and who named it.
Also sometimes it’s spelled “key” instead.
My wife is Jewish. One day when she was very little, she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word “breath,” she asked her mother why they didn’t have a “wreth” in their home.
In our household we now and forever pronounce it “wreth” on purpose because of how much I love that story.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
Bro let me tell you how recently I realized…
👆
Lol
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
In your defense, “Segway” is a real brand of some kind of transport thingy, which might be where you picked it up.
And they’re named that because they make devices that move smoothly from one place to another, just like the literary device.
Gif
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This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable “paradigm.”
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
Or you like to fuck with people.
Paprika? Pahp-reh-cah.
paper-ka
Yo sa mite for Yosemite is my worst one.
My sister and I did this intentionally to be funny as kids. We took my son there last year and he did the same thing without hearing the story. Pretty funny for me.
Hysteresis got me.
OK, so then I’m proud of the fact that I thought Hermione from the Harry Potter books was pronounced HER-me-own.
I pronounced it the same way, until whichever book has that scene with Viktor Krum pronouncing it wrong and being corrected. I believe the story goes that Rowling included that scene because there were so many of us doing it.
So how is it pronounced?
Her - my - un - ee
Her my ohnee
That’s how we pronounce it in Spain! Actually the H has no sound, so she’s just “er-me-on”
Segue still gets me. In my head I still pronounce it like rogue.
Every time.
I have noticed a lot of (youtube) people are keenly aware of their faults. Admitting you have a thing to try improve up on, is an triple up that I can unfortunately only give as 1/3 of a triple agree. If you know you are butchering grammar/spelling, giving a pre-warning is only going to make it funny.
This was me as a 7 year-old, reading The Hobbit and LotR. 33 years, and many rereads later, I still pronounce Gollum as golem and Smaug as smog.
“[…] I still pronounce […] Smaug as smog.”
Wait, what? I can’t remember when it was pronounced in the movies and I also (mentally) pronounce it as ‘Smog.’ It has never come up in IRL conversation so I don’t know how it’s actually pronounced.
Does anyone have a clip/timestamp on a video to show how it’s actually pronounced? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movies.
It’s /smawg/, it should sort of feel like the name doesn’t fit me your mouth properly, English phonotactics doesn’t allow for gliding from W to G without a vowel in between.
Yeaa… I totally learned skibidi rizz from a book…
