this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is "brought" and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that's it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say "Scotland, Ye cannae show I'm wrang"
As a native English speaker I can pronounce English words I've never seen before pretty easily. I'd say that there is a general system to it, but it just has a metric fuckton of exceptions. Though to be honest, it's not really all that different from having to learn the genders for every single noun in gendered languages coming from a non-gendered language. At least pronunciation in English follows a certain kind of logic (albeit one heavily influenced by loanwords). Gendering of nouns has always seemed completely arbitrary and is just straight memorization.
Yeeeah maaaybe still I would think that at least in my language is easier in english seems to be more crazy maybe I'm biased IDK.
See gendering in spanish has a general rule with few exceptions
Ends with -N, -O, -R, -S, -L, -U -I 99% chance of Male gendering
Ends with A, -DAD, -TAD, -ED, -SION, -CIÓN, -DEZ, -TIS, -IZ 95% female gendering. Some words that end with -MA, -PA and -TA can be male many exceptions there watch out. Now you would be asking there should be many more endings to words... And I'd say male gender for everything unless the subject is established to be female. Now yes there are tricky ones that change the meaning with the gender
El cura - the priest
La cura - the cure
El papá - the dad (note it also has a tilde)
La papa - the potato
I believe anyway the ambiguos ones are not many really if they are more than a hundred I'd be surprised more than 2 hundred nearly impossible but I'm no linguist.
Now I think this would be a summed up version of the rule but I'd say is pretty close to the thing and fits a paragraph, personally for what I've seen I think the hard thing is getting used to handle gendering without thinking in gender. That's confusing for many English speakers and some Japanese complaint bout the same.
I have advice below if you’re interested, but if you’re just ranting, that’s totally fair and feel free to ignore the rest.
Honestly, just treat English as a pictographic language. The pronunciation rules have so many exceptions, that you can either get well informed about the history of English spelling and the etymology of new vocabulary, or you can just assume the spelling is decoupled from the pronunciation. Spelling is probably less important than pronunciation generally (though it depends on how you use English) because spellcheck is pretty good nowadays.
Yeah that's what I did basically. It's a good advice at the end of the day.