Learning a second language is always hard, but it's a heck of a lot harder if you're trying to learn English!
If you grew up an native English speaker, there's a good chance you took Spanish or French in school. While it might have seemed challenging at the time, both French and Spanish are relatively easy to learn because they have pretty regular rules for grammar and pronunciation.
If you're feeling like you want a little language lesson right now, check out this guide to saying "hello" in 21 different languages!
Just avoid English, because, oh boy, is it tough if you don't speak it fluently.
English is incredibly irregular, with tons of weird verbs and arbitrary rules, and the pronunciation is a nightmare if you didn't grow up with it!
Even native English speakers will struggle with words like "cacophony" and "mischievous," so just imagine trying to learn it as a second language.
Need to see it firsthand? Check out a poem called "The Chaos" written by Gerard Nolst Trenité in the late nineteenth century.
It makes the point that English is riddled with strange words that are spelled similarly but don't sound alike, and also words that are spelled nothing alike but rhyme perfectly.
Most importantly, the words of the poem demonstrate, once and for all that, when it comes to pronunciation, almost nobody gets everything right!
Scroll through below to see whether you're part of the 10% that can master all of these words without any mistakes!
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Were you able to pronounce all of the words correctly on the first try? Let us know in the comments below!
And don't forget to SHARE with friends and family who love how crazy language is!
