While flipping through the catalogue of a German company called Depot, my wife noticed the expression “You are on the wood way” in one of the pictures. Quite obviously, that is not a proper English expression, but a literal translation of the German phrase “Auf dem Holzweg sein“. The latter is usually translated as “to
During a recent trip, I noticed that many flight attendants mispronounce the word fasten (as in “fasten your seatbelt”). This is quite surprising given that they use this word very often (I’ll come back to often). In contrast to the word fast, the letter t in fasten is not pronounced. Instead, fasten is pronounced as
While apparently rather simple at first sight, the word interaction is very often mispronounced. In fact, there are two pitfalls. First, as discussed in this recent post, action is pronounced as [ˈækʃn] rather than [ˈæktʃn], listen here. Second, a remarkable number of people do not pronounce the letter r in interaction, which is incorrect. The
English pronunciation can be tricky. In addition to sounds which are not used in many other languages, the pronunciation of a given letter can depend on the letters nearby or even on the whole word. In this post, I want to given a rather detailed discussion of the pronunciation of the letter t. A key
Most high-quality science journals have editors who will proof-read your manuscript before it is printed or published online. While not all journals exclusively employ native speakers as editors, their English is typically very good. Therefore, the proofs you receive should not be regarded as an annoying hurdle on the way to another publication, but can
On a recent commute to work, I happened to notice the words Logistic Center written in huge letters on a company building here in Germany (you can see it in one of the pictures here). As mentioned in a previous post, there are many false friends of this type that differ from the correct English
While listening to German radio the other day, I noticed that the presenter repeatedly pronounced the German word Passwort incorrectly. The mistake was that he pronounced “Pass-” as in the British pronunciation of the English word password, listen here and here. The correct pronunciation of Passwort can be found here. I find the mistake quite
Since a substantial part of the material covered in this blog comes from my encounters with scientific papers and talks, I am wondering how many of you would actually like to get feedback regarding potential shortcomings regarding their English skills. I have never been a fan of public practise talks, simply because I think that
As you may remember from school, the bell-shaped curve that plays a key role in statistics, often referred to as a normal distribution, is also called a Gaussian. I have noticed that there is a lot of confusion and variation regarding the pronunciation of the word Gaussian, in particular among German native speakers. The reason
The Latin phrase et cetera (usually abbreviated as etc.), which may be translated as “and so forth” or “and other things”, is commonly used in the English language. While listening to this video, I remembered that I had previously heard a number of people pronounce et cetera in an unusual way. The correct pronunciations (there