I was wondering...
I was wondering if phonemes are something native English speakers are aware of.
As an English student, I find it really difficult to learn how to draw these symbols, let alone to remember how each one sounds! So I was wondering if phonemes are taught to English native speakers at school, or maybe not.
Do you know the phonemes? Are you able to ra?t la?k ð?s?
1 Answer
In my experience, the average English speaker, who is not specifically educated in language, has no idea how to read a phonetic pronunciation, and speaks purely from verbal memory, and has learned spelling secondarily under the bizarre rules that we follow, and in fact will frequently mispronounce a written word if it does not follow a usual pattern, until they have heard the word pronounced and can commit it to memory.
There are plenty of educated people on this site, who probably can. But no one in my real life would be able to, and I can’t- in fact I sort of have an idea of what a schwa is - but for the rest mostly we stick in letters, like h, that drive other English speakers to say something right from the familiarity of the components.
Most English speakers (again without education in language) seem to think the language has 5 vowels. And if I tell them, no, there are more, they simply add y.
And with the idea that an umbrella is a different u from a university, it is purely by instinct that one gets a and the other an. Nothing to do with a mental image of the pronunciation.
Native speakers learn the oral language first, and then the written. Adult second language learners start with the written, and then add oral.
That being said, I can read what you wrote, even though I would have no idea how to write it, and can only read it because of context and sufficient similarity.
