When I worked as an English teacher in France, the school principal was someone called “Monsieur Lelong.” Can you guess how “Lelong” is pronounced?

I don’t know what your answer was, but I pronounced it “Lee-long.” One day, I was talking with a parent when Monsieur Lelong came up in a conversation.

“Monsieur who?” the parent asked, confused.

“Monsieur Lee-long. Uh … the principal?”

“Oh! You mean ‘Monsieur Leuh-long!” A look of realization crossed the parent’s face.

So, as I learned the hard way, the French E is never pronounced “ee.” Soon after, I realized that many other English native-speakers in France mispronounced their French E’s too. And this pattern was pretty constant across proficiency levels!

A similar issue affects our students too. You’ve probably noticed that even advanced learners who pronounce most things accurately still make what seem like beginner-level mistakes. Let’s delve into two reasons that cause this to happen.

Sound and Spelling

Like English, many languages use some version of the Latin alphabet as their writing system. Spanish, German, Turkish, and Vietnamese are a few examples.

In addition, many other languages use a system of romanization that assigns English letters to sounds in their native languages. These romanization systems are what our students use to spell their names in English, e.g. “Kenji” and “Hyunwoo.”

In other words, most English learners are familiar with the Latin alphabet. While this is an advantage in the beginning, it can result in some persistent pronunciation problems down the line – similar to the kind I made in French.

This is because of something called “sound-spelling correspondence” or our understanding of how letters are pronounced.

Sound-spelling correspondences for the letter A and the letter combination CH

For example, when English speakers see the letter A, we tend to pronounce it like the A’s in the words “art,” “lamb,” or “apron.” In our minds, the letter A corresponds to these three sounds and every other letter of the alphabet corresponds to its own set of sounds.

The same applies to letter combinations like CH or KN. We have expectations of what these should sound like that are often different from other languages. This is why English speakers are often surprised to find that German words with the KN combination don’t leave the K silent.

And because we internalize these expectations – or sound-spelling correspondences – so early in life, unlearning them for a foreign language is extremely difficult!

But how does this apply to our students? Well, the romanization systems our students are used to usually have a closer one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. For example, the letter O in Japanese and Korean romanization corresponds only to the “oh” sound in English.

This might not seem like a big deal, but in reality, the letter O in English is pronounced “oh” only about 30% of the time. The other 70%, it’s pronounced in different ways, like “uh” (as in “oven”), “ah” (as in “opera”), or “aw” (as in “off”).

Learners who aren’t aware of this will try to pronounce all single O’s, “oh.” Funnily, when our company mascot became an owl, we noticed many students mistakenly pronounced the word, “ohl.”

Loanwords

“Loanwords” are, just like the name says, words borrowed from other languages, and they’re another source of persistent pronunciation mistakes.

An example most of you will be familiar with is the Japanese loanword for “salad”: “salada.” Most Japanese people are convinced that “salada” is the original English word, and it’s very difficult to convince them otherwise.

You may have also noticed that Taiwanese students pronounce “pudding,” “booding.” Even though P and B are separate sounds in Mandarin, “pudding” was translated as “booding” in Chinese and as a result, most Chinese speakers struggle to pronounce “pudding.”

As you can see, these loanwords cause students who have otherwise good pronunciation to make mistakes. Here are some other errors you’ll hear Japanese students make:

"It's tsoo o'clock" instead of "It's two o'clock." The too sound exists in Japanese (トゥー), but because the number two was translated as “tsu,” most Japanese people think “two” is pronounced “tsu.”

Similarly, the English word "tip" was transliterated as "chip-poo," so even though the sound "tip" does exist in Japanese, most Japanese will say "chip-poo."

👋 That’s it for now!

Have you noticed any other letters or words that students always mispronounce no matter how many times you correct them?

If not, keep an ear out for them. When you notice them:

Ask your student what the word in their language is, and you might find that their mispronunciation stems from a loanword.
Look up how the letter in question is pronounced in their language and you might find that they’re misunderstanding sound-spelling patterns.

For ideas on how to best correct persistent mistakes like these, see this post on loanwords.

Happy tutoring!