You’ve got a lisp

Sean Connery? I thought you were dead!

There’s no SH sound in strawberry, you’re just pronouncing it wrong. (And that’s something I almost never say, as language is always changing).

See the pronunciation guide here for “straw”, and click on the speaker, you’ll hear the correct pronunciation.

shounds like a shtupid shuggestion to me

I think you might be the only one …

I think this way of speaking developed in the USA over the last 30 years or so.

I saw a video about that a few months ago how people seem to put the sh sound into more and more places. Like they don’t say stormtrooper, they say shtormshrooper. Can’t find it anymore and don’t remember the channel.

To me it sounds weird. We learned this as a distinct difference to German that it’s straw and not shtraw, like it would be pronounced in German.

I very rarely meet anyone who says “truck” - most people I know say “chruck” and when they say “truck” it sounds very forced. Same with other words that start with “tr”. They push the word through their teeth rather than putting their tongue on the roof of their mouth.

Enunciation is key.

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Do you have this problem only with “strawberry” or also with “straw” alone? What about other words beginning with str-, like street or straight?

My first language doesn’t have syllable-initial st-, yet pronouncing any of these words is no problem for me at all in English.