For people whose first language is not English

In My Humble Opinion
1

Please think back to your earliest days and weeks of learning English, and pretend that you have no more knowledge of English than you had then. Based on that, which of the following words (if any) would have looked like English words to you at that time. Note: none of the words is actually English, I’m just wondering which ones look like English in terms of spelling and sound. Thanks.

Mutaling

Schmenkt

Roisser

Mgwambo

Furerherstant

Chorster

Droth

Uhuluamaliki

Srskzins

Arsh

Lemler

Tlatla

Thonch

Arught

2

I showed the list to a work colleague whose first language was not English. Her answer:

Mutaling
Chorster
Arsh
Arught

3

Mutaling
Chorster
Droth
Arught

Maybe Lemler
Schmenkt, Furerherstant and Arsh looks German.

Roisser looks French.

Mgwambo, Uhuluamaliki and Tlatla looks African / Aztec / Tribal etc.

Srskzins looks like alien name from bad SciFi.

Thonch just doesn’t ring any bell for me.

4

Mutaling and Lemler are about the only ones. Roisser maaaaaaybe.

5

Mutaling (as a verb, as in “We were mutaling our way home, when suddenly, the car broke down”)

Arsh (Reminds me of ash and arse)

Thonch (ch’s seem more English at the end of a word then at the beginning)

(seen from a Dutch perspective)

6

Chorster
Droth
Arught

7

This thread might be relevant to this discussion. Check out jjimm’s post #33 describing how English sounds to a five-year-old Welsh child who didn’t speak English.

8

Mutaling

Chorster

Droth

Arsh

Thonch

9

Here is a quick translation from a norwegian song about Hjalmar singing rock songs in his own makebelief english:

"Hjalmar was a fourth grader
who believed that he rocked liked Elton John,
Hjalmar did not do his homework
but thought he sounded like an englishman
when he sang

Oh – you gonna rapsoly take a ly
Oh – villy brake along sack a by
Hey – calling sip and I big a ring
Taking ree boy, racksely toy
Blue sorry love you hey fickany loo"

So if I was a fourthgrader looking at the given words, I would say that chorster and thonch would sound like english words to me.

10

I asked a friend (Polish) this morning - this was the result:

Mutaling
Roisser
Chorster
Droth
Arsh
Lemler
Thonch

She seemed to thing the -er, -(c,s,t)h and -ing endings were very characteristic of English.

11

The words I have bolded are those that I would say look English. I also indicated what language(s) the other words remind me of. My first language is French, by the way.

Mutaling: Definitely English
Schmenkt: German
Roisser: French
Mgwambo: Some African language
Furerherstant: German or Afrikaans
Chorster: English
Droth: Possibly English as well
Uhuluamaliki: Finnish?
Srskzins: Hungarian
Arsh: Possibly Anglo-Saxon
Lemler: German
Tlatla: Aztec
Thonch: English
Arught: English

12

Mutaling

Chorster

Droth

Thonch

13

Mutaling

Roisser

Chorster

Droth

Srskzins

Lemler

My first language is Spanish. I knew a few words of English when I came to the States at age 9, mostly from reading my cousin’s English textbook. I picked up the language fairly quickly, and was fluent within a year of my arrival.

14

Chorster
Droth
Arsh (would have been memorable as homophone of German Arsch i.e. arse)
Thonch

(the th phoneme is probably the most unfamiliar of the frequent ones for a German beginning to learn English, also the most likely to trip over when speaking)