Extreme English

Every language has its share of words and phrases that are particularly difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce. Hold on now! If you sense agony and frustration looming ahead in this column, with your tongue and lips twisting helplessly in opposite directions - relax. Let's deal with some of the problem words that English offers Russian speakers like adults, shall we? Professor Extreme feels your pain.

Look, I've been humbled too. After multiple sessions with expert phoneticists at Leningrad State University, I finally realized (as did they, eyes rolling) that I would never pronounce the Russian word for four (четыре/chetyre) or the name of a popular cabbage soup (щи/shchi) quite right - so to this day I habitually talk here about groups of "two or three" or "five or six," and eat lots of борщ/borshch (though I like щи/shchi better, damn it).

A life without cabbage soup is one thing, but acute target-language tetraphobia (fear of the number four) is a very high price for averting linguo-embarrassment. So let's try to keep your self-consciousness from limiting you in English the way mine has handicapped me in Russian for more than three but fewer than five decades.

C'mon, we'll start easy and work up:

1. Words not to worry about at all

Several categories of English words simply beg to be mispronounced - by everybody, including us. Among these are the ridiculously long names of various diseases you won't get (20 letters and more, ending in -osis and -itis); clumsy pop-psych diagnoses, such as bromidrophobia (fear of body odor - if you use the metro circle line daily, you're immune); and show-offy composites such as floccinaucinihilipilificatrix, which if entered in the search box on Google will prompt the obvious question: "Did you mean floccinaucinihilipilification?"

Of course you did (forehead slap!): it's the act of estimating something as worthless, which is the practical value of this word and most other logo-curiosities of its ilk. Chuckle at them and move right on.

2. Words not to worry too much about

A second often-mispronounced group consists of common words that many Americans themselves somehow screw up. Don't ask. Just enjoy them as a win-win category: if you're caught mispronouncing one you can say, "Hey, that's the way Chuck says it"; and when you get them right, you can smugly enjoy speaking better English than that doof Chuck. Here are a half-dozen regular offenders:

- athlete: two syllables, please, not ‘athelete';
- library, February: often mispronounced by eliding the first r;
- escape: some say ‘excape'; and some also say ‘aks' for ask - yikes for both;
- height: there is no such word as ‘heighth';
- nuclear: and there is no ‘nucular,' except in the tiny mind of George W. Bush.

3. OK, start worrying

(a) 20-odd words end in -ough, spanning five pronunciations: rough [ruhf], cough [kawf], through [throo], dough [doh] and bough [bou].

Google the whole list; look up each word at dictionary.com; and memorize how the 10-12 you'll actually use are said.

Don't just sit there, do it!

(b) single-syllable words using long/short vowel variants, especially [ee] vs. [i].

English is rife with long/short vowel distinctions that many Russian speakers make haphazardly or not at all, since such pairs as seat (with the [ee] vowel) and sit (with [i]) sound virtually the same to them.

Trust me, beet and bit sound very different to Anglophones.

Look, pronounce a nice long, slow be-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-t out loud; then rapidly say bit-bit-bit-bit-bit. See?

How important is this? In multisyllabic words, a slightly-off vowel articulation often won't hurt much; but if you don't produce a clear, long-vowel version of, say, sheet...

OK, now return with new vigor to the long/short vowel-comparison list in your grammar text, he-e-e-e-e-e-e-eat up your dorm room and hit-hit-hit-hit-hit the books! 

4. Be afraid. Be very afraid

Just kidding! The th combination is very difficult for many Russians - but it usually yields to practice in all but one damnably difficult case: clothes. Alas, this word has only one syllable, and in exemplary English the th really is sounded (slightly). Sorry.

­The good news is that as English conversational tempo advances, the word comes ever closer to sounding like close (the verb form). So as you draw nearer and nearer a native pace, clothes will become easier and easier to pronounce without embarrassment - and think of all the hurry-up situations when that will help!

There, that wasn't so bad, was it? Now stop smirking and help me with these four (четыре/chetyre) bowls of щи/shchi!

Extremely Happy New Year! / С экстремальным новым годом!

Extreme Extra Credit: Last time: Jimmy Breslin's semicolon-using criminal was not the Harvard-trained Unabomber, as some thought, but the less educated yet equally deranged "Son of Sam." Congrats to Arch Stanton of Tombstone, AZ, for the first correct ID.

Today: How do San Franciscans pronounce Gough Street? (West Bay residents are ineligible).

Mark H. Teeter is an American English teacher and translator based in Moscow.