Every time I take the bus in Munich, I hear the number five (as in U5, the underground line I take) being pronounced incorrectly, namely as [faɪf] instead of [faɪv]. You can hear the correct pronunciation here. This common mistake among German speakers is also often made in the case of live; live is correctly pronounced as
While flipping through my trusted Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, I came across the name Würzburg, a lovely city in Germany. As you may expect, the umlaut makes the English pronunciation a nontrivial issue. Since there is no ü sound in English, it has to be replaced by something else (ignoring this rule may show that you
Abbreviations such as LCD, HTML, or USA are commonly used in many languages. The correct pronunciation of such abbreviations is a two-step process. First, you have to be able to correctly pronounce each of the letters. As discussed in a previous post, this task can be more daunting than you would expect even for advanced
The pronunciation of the word day is straight-forward, or is it? Have you ever noticed that day, which is pronounced as [deɪ] in day, today, everyday, weekday, etc., can also be pronounced as [di] when being part of the weekdays Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday? The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary argues that [di]
The alphabet is among the first things people learn when they study the English language. Remarkably, quite a number of advanced speakers have problems pronouncing the letters. In particular, the last three letters, x, y, and z cause most of the problems. X is correctly pronounced as [eks], listen here. A common mistake is the
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
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