Flammie A Pirinen on github pages
I am not a native speaker of English, and that much should be obvious from reading or listening to me. I am, however, a computational linguists and I recognise my mistakes as I make them, and they are interesting. Here is an open listing of hwat I discovered. There are few very places where I specifically make note of the limits of my English:
My native language is Finnish, and like many people, I do not have a good skill in pronouncing foreing sounds. I know few people who can do that, but generally, people are stuck to the sounds of their native languages, unless really concentrating. Pronounciations can be easily compared:
| English | Finnish |
|---|---|
| ɑ | ɑ |
| ʌ | a |
| b | p |
| d | d (t) |
| dʒ | ds (ts) |
| e | e |
| ə | e |
| ɜ | e |
| f | f (v) |
| g | k |
| h | h |
| x | x |
| ɪ | i |
| iː | i |
| j | j |
| kʰ | k |
| l | l |
| m | m |
| n | n |
| ŋ | ŋ |
| ɔ | o |
| pʰ | p |
| r | R |
| s | s |
| ʃ | s |
| tʰ | t |
| θ | t |
| ð | t |
| ʊ | u |
| u | u |
| v | v |
| w | v |
| z | s |
| ʒ | s |
| æ | æ |
| ə | ø |
It really depends on the listener what they tolerate and understand, but I am gonna mention more closely few specific examples I am constantly aware.
For me one of the easiest way to catch bad Finnish accent, including my own, is to listen to consonants called stops, that is k, p, t, g, b, and d. Historically, Finnish only has k, p and t, while modern loan words have brought g, b and d to Finnish, the pronunciation varies and does not match English at all. In English k sound can be told apart from g sound by aspiration, in carefully pronounced Finnish k is not aspirated but g is kind of voiced. The same happens to p and b and to certain extent with t and d, although the last pair is slightly different because it has existed in Finnish as an opposing pair the longest. What this really means, is that when I am not pronouncing carefully, there is often no notable difference between, say, cot and got, pot and bot or tot and dot. Even more so, the latter of each pair will definitely sound like former for those who do not expect foreigner pronunciation, the most prominent example of this is my christening name: Tommi. If I pronounce it in Finnish way, most people will write down Dom or Dominic of some sort. To make sure I am understood I have to pronounce it in a way that to me is very exaggeratedly aspirated: T-hhh-ommmei, but then, it will be mostly written as Tommy in the papers. Oh well.
There is no sh sound in Finnish. Also no z and no zh. However, I have a feeling that Finnish s’s wander between s and sh and are generally less foreign sounding, or maybe there is enough variation in world Englishes that this does not sound so unusual. But it is important to notice that when I am not pronouncing carefully, I do not make different sounds pronouncing sit and shit, for example. Same problem applies to all z’s and zh’s, they all mix together but they are so much rarer that they are not so bothersome and also easier to remember to make an effort to prnounce carefully, I will rarely pronounce zeroes llike sheroes or some such.
As a side note, while Finnish does not have z, it is mainly known from succh italian loans as pizza and proncounced like ch, so it would not be unusual for me to pronounce zebra like it was spelled cheapra.
Yes, Finnish does not have th sounds of any kind. It is just a t sound. That sounds very jarring to other Finnish speakers, however, since this is not uncommon in world’s Englishes, certainly Irish English has almost exactly same feature, a ot of people understand very well if I pronounce three like tree.
Finnish has 8 vowel sounds and English at least 11, they do not overlap neatly so when Finns pronounce English chaos ensues. This is also where Finnish tendency to associate letters with sounds shows up strongly, it is rather hard for a finn to understand that though a tough cough without a thought has ou five times it has different vowel in the words each time. Also with like cat and cart. Of course most fun is to know that vowel in read and read is different as well. As a final hit, words that seem to start with vowel but have consonant are really hard for me: university I start to pronounce like un in uncool and Euro-words like eeww (or a diphthong sound eu from Finnish that really doesn’t exist in English).
This is probably less noticeable for English speakers than you might think, the variation is so huge between dialects. E.g. if you browse through wikipedia for English phonology you run into articles like cot–caught merger and Father–bother merger. Another fine xample is Irish u in pub, Dublin or even bus is rather closer to Finnish u than English u in those words.
One thing that I will often miss if not concentrating is the /j/ sound in words like beautiful, so it turns out like bootiful. This sound actually appears a lot more in English than you’d think:
Monolingual people will often wonder if people proficient in languages have to think what they say in native language and translate it in their heads, I think for me the answer in English is a bit of that and a bit of natively speaking. For some words and structures I think my English will sound idiomatic without efforts but when something goes weird the underlying problem is often a too direct translation.
Finnish and English grammars are quite far apart, when speaking spontaneously and without thinking it is not unusual to mix word orders and ignore other differences.
There’s none in Finnish, I need to be very conscious of gendering to produce he or she correctly, I developed a habit of overusing singular they way before it became common, i.e. even in sentences where context already has gendered other things.
There’s none of this the, a, an nonsense in Finnish and the rules of using them in English is wildly arbitrary and illogical, I do not use them systematically at all. It usually mostly matters in writing though, in speaking ignoring or adding articles is so easily overlooked that people generally do not mind.
Adpositions are used in English for two different things that are very unintuitive for non-native speaker. The more concrete use is to mainly indicate locations and sometimes directions: in, at and on are particularly confusables for many cases. There is not very strong logic behind the difference of at the airport, at home, in school, in Sweden etc., you can always try and come up with rationalisations but the problem is, other languages selected differently and their speakers also insist they are logical with good reasonings. This is not a case that usually hinders underestanding, so it is naturally ignored in real world use a lot. Some people might even say there’s a difference between in the airport and at the airport, but the reality of this kind of language use is, is if you do intend to make such difference, it is lost on majority of your readers / listeners.
The second arbitrary use case of adpositions is in so-called phrasal verb constructions, here the adposition is kind of tacked on afters some verb to make totally new verb, for example: fuck up has not much to do with copulating and definetely nothng with direction up. I feel like I have learnt these more systematically than the adpositions of places though, apart from such edge cases like write down ~ write up which is kind of inverse of the Finnish idiom, I don’t often mistake the things here then.
I should note that the mistakes I make can stack up, like today, I meant something like they met at the restaurant, but said they met in a restaurant, does the meaning change, did the listeners get what I meant, I’m not really sure.
Contrary to popular belief, words rarely translate 1:1 between languages, for most words it can be quite near but more often than not it is not. For example, one common thing I will say is either like “Germany is difficult, we should go French” like, the names of languages and countries in Finnish are 99 % the same, I am not consciously aware of the difference all the time. It is btw the same phenomenon when I mix up he and she, because there is no distinction in my language I do not keep the distinction in my active memory when talking and blurt out random choice.
A lot of words, especially adjectives, occupy a part of scale or such a space, which is never a direct match but like 80 % overlap here and there. For example, the words possibly, probably, surely, certainly, etc, occupy a slice on the likelihood scale, which is not at all the same slice as their Finnish counterparts, so there will be a lot of suspicious usage for any foreign language speakers. It is also next to impossible to know for sure which of these words convey negative attitudes, ignorance or dismissal for a non-native speaker. Just to keep in mind.