“Get gegeugen.”
Hristofor from North Macedonia looks at me expectantly.
”Bíj́na” (almost), I encourage him. “One more try: Het geheugen.”
Understanding a foreign language is one thing. Pronouncing it properly is quite another.
For a non-native speaker, this often comes with a lot of frustration.
After all, if you have the correct words in the right order, why on earth don’t native speakers understand you? What’s wrong with those people?
Fact is that in some languages there is simply no distinction between certain sounds. The v [v] and w [ʋ] are an obvious example. The r [r] and l [l] are also exemplary.
If you never learned to distinguish between such sound pairs as a child, it is hard to do so as an adult. Even if you learn it eventually, producing the clear distinction requires an entirely different skill.
Take the g [ɣ] and h [ɦ] in the Dutch word het geheugen (the memory), with which Hristofor is struggling tonight.
No matter how hard he tries, it still sounds like four times g [ɣ]. (Sorry, Hristofor)
”Don’t the Dutch ever have trouble with g and h?”, he wonders. To him they sound so identical that he cannot imagine Dutch natives hear something he doesn’t.
He just can’t.
Unfortunately for him, they certainly encounter phonetic challenges, but in most Dutch dialects this is not one of them.
When he asks me for a smart hack to crack the h code, I give him two.
One is pretending to breathe onto your glasses to clean them. The other is laughing out loud—‘hahaha’. Thing is, I tell him, both best work when pretending to breathe onto your glasses or when laughing out loud…
He sighs.
“Sighing is actually a great hack too!”, I laugh, sticking up my thumb.
Hristofor gets a taste of revenge during de borrel after class, when Gisèle from France gloatingly corrects my pronunciation of a French word* up to three times.
And here I was thinking I nailed it the first time.
* Okay, okay, we were - as always - talkin’ food. And the word in question was gésiers ([ʒe.zje] de canard; duck stomachs—a French delicacy). I admit, a [zj] sound right after the softer [ʒ] is challenging.
I teach NT2 (Dutch as a second language), mainly to internationals who came to Amsterdam for or with love and are here to stay. The conversations presented here were all held in Dutch. For privacy reasons the names are fictitious. Soon out: my bilingual book Nederlands is zooo makkelijk | Dutch is sooo easy.
Phonetics Lingo
De uitspraak - pronunciation
Uitspreken - pronounce
De klank - sound
De fonetiek/fonetica - phonetics
