Un artículo publicado en inglés y español, que te ayudará en tu lectura, pero principalmente sirve para expresar una opinión.

An article in English and Spanish which will help you in your reading, but mainly serves to express an opinion.

What is the Most Difficult Word to Pronounce?

LA PALABRA MÁS DIFÍCIL

What is the most difficult regular word in English for a Spanish speaker to pronounce?

That’s a difficult question, and there might be many different answers.  After all, many native English speakers don’t know how to pronounce everything.

But for the student of pronunciation of English, what ordinary word tops the list?

In my experience it’s ‘available’ (disponible). This word presents five separate points of pronunciation:

1.   av =    av de avena.

2.   ai=      ey de rey  (y no ‘ay’ de ‘caray’ as it sounds in Spanish)

3.   la =     como ‘la’

4.   ble =   bal, because the final ‘e’ must be mute.

5.   emphasis (tilde) on ‘ey’

so we have –

AV-EY- LA-BAL

The pronunciation of this word is especially difficult because of the confusion in Spanish between ‘b’ and ‘v’ (a confusion which doesn’t exist in English). If your first two syllables of ‘available’ sound like ‘abay’ in Spanish your listener will never be able to guess which word you are trying to say.

Another simple word that causes problems in speaking English is ‘world’ (mundo). I think it’s because of the three consonants in a row – it’s nearly impossible to say it precisely.

English people in England (not in the whole of Britain) can’t pronounce the letter ‘r’ and don’t usually try to. For them, ‘pepper’ (pimienta) is ‘pepa’ and ‘letter’ (carta) is ‘leta’. You should not try to imitate this kind of pronunciation.

But it means that English people say ‘woold’ (o de olla) instead of ‘world’. Scottish people are famous for pronouncing the letter ‘r’ very strongly, so they say something like ‘warrald’ (uarrald). The correct international sound is somewhere between the two.

You don’t have to worry about it because, as always happens in English, the context will help to make your meaning clear. In addition, there is no other regular word in English that can be confused with ‘world’. The only possibility is ‘wold’, which is so regional and obscure that I’m not even going to tell you what it means.

If you are a person who confuses ‘world’ (mundo) with ‘word’ (palabra) then you should note that, although they’re very similar, the phonetic for ‘world’ is UORLd (o de olla and a weak ‘d’ ) and for ‘word’ it is UARD (a de avena) with a strong ‘D’ at the end.