This is funny but I don’t get the connection.
Sorry. The cartoon mentions the fact that /th/ is used in few (though very popular) languages, which means that a lot of ESL learners will probably struggle with it - which seemed on point.
Years ago, I worked with an Asian gentleman whose name was Yi. I asked him if that was pronounced “yee” or “eee”, and he said, “You’re saying the same thing.” It blew my mind – it never really occurred to me that non-native speakers literally couldn’t hear a difference.
I’m still not sure how it’s pronounced, I guess.
Since he and the people he grew up with apparently don’t hear the difference, it’s apparently pronounced either way. It would be like asking me if my name was pronounced with a rising tone or a descending one - tone doesn’t make a difference in English (for the most part), just like (apparently the difference betweenYee and eee made no difference to the fellow you were talking to.
When I was in Japan, my host explained that there is a sound in Japanese that sounds like an f to English speakers but is not the same. He told that when he is speaking English and mentions Fuji, it is with the English f, but when speaking Japanese, he uses the other one. But he was linguistically gifted, speaking excellent English along with French and German. The English f is labio-dental (upper lip on lower teeth) while the Japanese one is bilabial.
These problems are exacerbated by automated voice systems. Today I was at an address on Cote des Neiges, a major Montreal thoroughfare, trying to call a taxi. The automated system first asked French or English. My French is lousy so I chose English. Then it asked where I was. I have no idea what its recognition system expects of an English pronunciation but I only know the name of the street in French, roughly coat day nejj. The automated system simply could not interpret it and I had to wait nearly 7 minutes for a human to pick up the phone. She spoke good English but obviously understood the name of the street. I hate these automated answering systems.
Those automated systems never ever understand my parents’ thick Hungarian accent.
I once heard that road name, translated for some American tourists, called “Snow Hill Highway “. I just about burst out laughing!
Many decades ago, I first heard that particular variety of New York-ish accent that says “YOOGE” for “huge.” I mocked the pronunciation “yooge” to an acquaintance, who, being from Back East himself, literally could not hear the difference (or claimed not to be able to). “You’re saying the same thing” indeed.
There are two separate things which can happen. Japanese will sometimes forget which letter to use and will mix them up. I see this sometimes in texting with my friends and have heard people as well.
The other is probably as you say. I’m an ESL teacher and not a linguist, so I could be wrong, but we could be assigning consonant sounds to the intermediate sound.
I read an explanation (but it was years ago, so the facts may not be perfect), but some linguists described an experiment where they combined a pair of voiced and unvoiced consonants such as “b” and “p” in increasing ratios from 0/10, 1/9, 2/8 . . . 9/1 and then 10/0. What they found was that people don’t hear middle as combination sounds, they will hear the “b” sound until a certain point and then will suddenly hear a “p” sound.
Native speakers of different sounds will have different “tipping points” where that switch happens. This is why Chinese “b” sounds are heard as “p” sounds by native English speakers.
My wife is a native Chinese speaker and I sometimes have difficulty with her spoken Japanese. I don’t have problems with Japanese spoken by native Japanese speakers or native English speakers but her slight Chinese accent occasionally makes it difficult for me to understand. Interestingly native Japanese don’t seem to have that same difficulty with her pronunciation.
This problem happens with Japanese baseball players and being asked how to pronounce their names, specifically which syllable takes the stress, but Japanese words aren’t stressed so it doesn’t matter to them.
In Japanese the “f” sound (ɸ in IPA) only occurs in combination with the vowel “u”, (ɯ in IPA), such as Fuji. for the other vowels, the romaji is written with an “h”: “ha”, “hi”, “he” and “ho”.
Japanese has loanwords which include an “f” such as “faito” ファイト (a word Japanese use to encourage people in games and not an altercation). Native speakers often will pronounce those closer to or similar to the English “f”.
I remember our Russian teacher preparing us to learn a new and different sound, and then loud and emphatically repeating it again and again. It was a little like watching somebody getting the Heimlich maneuver.
It always sounded closer to the vowel sounds in “phooey” to me, than to anything else in English.
Also not that as you go through the sequence ha, hi, he, ho, ?u, the lips get closer and closer as the vowel moves further back until, for Japanese at least, the lips nearly touch.
I remember seeing this movie.
In Sam Peckinpah’s Second World War movie Cross of Iron, a whirring comes across the battlefield, growing louder and louder, and an exhausted soldier raises his head from the trenches to identify the sound: “Tanks, tanks!” he cries. In France, the subtitles read " Merci, merci! "
Minimal pairs are all well and good, but sometimes you need a good helping of just one phoneme to really immerse yourself in it. Years ago, I had a phonetics teacher with maybe an unusual method. There was one textbook (“How Now Brown Cow” by Mimi Ponsonby), a collection of short texts, each focused on one sound. Each lesson was just a never-ending drill of listening and repeating the same one-page piece of dialogue.
Because the “th” sounds are especially difficult for speakers of our native language, we drilled these two chapters (for the voiced and unvoiced version) multiple times. It was boring as hell, but really helped drive home not only the method of pronunciation but also the sound of it in speech.
I haven’t seen that book in over a decade, but the first dialogue went more or less:
‘It’s my birthday on Thursday, my sixth birthday. That means I’m three hundred and thirty three days older than you, Ruth.’
‘Do you always put your thumb in your mouth when doing arithmetic, Arthur?’
‘My tooth’s loose, Ruth.’
…then they talked about authors who wrote for the theatre, I think. The other text contained this gem:
I’d rather be a father than a mother - all those hungry mouths!
These are reminding me that somewhere I read that the most difficult tongue twister in any language was the Iroquois for “the skunk rolled down and ruptured its larynx”. I’d like to hear that some day.
It’s in Xhosa, apparently. isiXhosa Tongue Twisters (alphadictionary.com)
And as a complete aside, now I know where the author Dafydd ap Hugh got the title for his story, “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk”. (Fun scifi story, full of wordplay.)
Xhosa! Well, that’s not the same at all! Thanks for fixing it!
The linked site renders it like this:
" Iqaqa laqabaleka iqhini latyibalika laqhawula uqhoqhoqho"
The same problem, but the other way around happened to me last year, I had 2 coworkers from the US, one was called Sean and the other John.
So I tried to say their names, but I couldn’t think on how to pronounce “Sean” and “John” differently, to my Spanish-as-first-language mind it was inconceivable that both names, sharing only the last letter, could be pronounced the same.
Finally both Sean and John told me that their names were, in fact, pronounced the same way, I’m still not sure I believe it.
That’s odd. Sean is usually pronounced “Shawn” which, in English, is not the same initial sound as the “J” sound in John.
That’s what I thought, but they insisted.
(Perhaps they were humoring me because I couldn’t make the necessary sounds?)
“John” is English, “Sean” is more Irish (don’t ask me how it works in the vocative), but it’s the same name (pronounced “Juan” in Spanish), is perhaps what was meant?