So, watching some anime this morning, I noticed a couple of words* that sound very similar (to my American ear) but were translated to very different meanings.
So, what english words sound similar to foreign ears while having radically different meanings? The only examples I can think of (courtesy of a story from my grandmother) is “paper” and “pepper”, “trap” and “trip”, and “fry” and “fly” (courtesy of Lethal Weapon 4 (I think, it’s one of the LW movies, I know that much)).
the two words I heard sounded like byosai and gyoksai (and that b sounded a LOT like a g or k)
There are going to be a lot of examples that differ mostly or entirely in their vowels, since English has many more vowel sounds than most languages. Spanish, for example, only has 10 distinct vowels, and so they tend to compress English vowels into those 10. South American acquaintances of mine have told me that they need to be very careful with the words “sheet” and “beach”, for instance, so they don’t accidentally turn them into “shit” and “bitch”.
My Ukrainian MIL had tons of words she confused. Preheat and reheat. (“I’ll little preheatl the food.”) Wall vs. vault. Radish vs. reddish. Anything where ‘t’ and ‘th’ are involved.
Yes. Heck, it’s not only learners who have this problem. I watched House MD, and couldn’t easily tell whether his boss was Lisa Cutty or Lisa Cuddy. The way they’re pronounced by many Americans, they sound the same to me.
I misunderstand other Americans. Just recently I was headed to a friend’s BBQ and called to see if she needed anything and was told to pick up some “wildcot” fish fillets. I wrote it down b/c I figured it was a kind of fish I’d never heard of. It was only when I was at the counter that I realized she meant “wild caught.”
Yes, but that’s not really a source of confusion, since neither of those really has a meaning beyond being a name. English word-pairs where swapping T for D would mix them up are fairly rare.
There’s a line in one of WoW’s dungeons where a librarian speaks of “sacred tomes”. I swear it always sounds to me like “secret”, I wouldn’t know it was sacred if not for the subtitles.
And all this time I thought we had 5 Are you counting dyptongs as vowels?
I briefly dated a young lady from Austria. She said the hardest sound for her to pick up was the th sound. When she first came to America she couldn’t differentiate between the th sound and the f sound. She said they initially sounded exactly the same to her.
I thought her accent was cute but her goal was to learn to speak accentless English. I once spent half the night teaching her how to pronounce the word “slut” properly. She’d been going around calling girls “schlots.”
Are you counting dyptongs as vowels?