There’s Nothing Wrong With How English Language Learners Say “Beach”
Believe it or not, it doesn’t sound like “Bitch”.
If you’ve ever seen the clip of “An Italian Man who went to Malta,” you know how certain words, said with an accent, can get you into trouble in English. If you haven’t seen it (and aren’t interested in crude humor), it is an Italian man’s series of misadventures while on vacation. Restaurant and hotel staff hear him saying the words, “piece”, “beach”, “sheet”, and “fork”, and hear something quite different.
In one scene, he explains that his bed wasn’t made, and insists, (reading aloud in your best foreign accent) “I wanna sheet on my bed!” to which the hotel clerk informs him, in no uncertain terms, not to do that.
It’s okay, you can laugh. As someone who has made embarrassing errors in the dozens (and it always ends up being something vulgar!) I know it’s part of the fun, so long as everyone is laughing together.
As fun as it is, it is also frustrating when you can’t get past that accent and you’re worried you’re constantly saying the wrong thing (fun fact, if you don’t ask for “pão” in Portuguese with the nasal accent on the “a”, the baker is going to think you’re asking for his… stick).
As an English teacher, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who are self-conscious about the way they say, “beach”. (You can imagine how it sounds). The thing is, they’re actually saying it right! It’s just a mind trick that makes it sound wrong.
A Sort of (Non-Optical) Illusion
It turns out that when we hear someone’s accent, we note the difference and compare it to the background of the rest of their sounds. If you hear a speaker with a Maine accent pronounce “car” without the ‘r’, then your brain is preparing yourself to hear “park” the same way. In fact, it would sound weird if they didn’t — it would stand out against the background of their accent.
So let’s try some accents. In your best mock-accent (let’s say… Spanish or Italian), read the following sentence.
“When it is hot, I like to sit on the beach.”
You probably said it something like this:
“Ween eat ees haat, I like to seet on the beetch.”
That’s normal — many other languages use longer vowels more often than English. Ours is one of the few languages that uses the “schwa”, a mid-central, soft, weak vowel. Many other languages (including most Romance languages) predominantly use longer vowels.
Romance languages typically sound more like:
(try reading the words first, then saying only the vowel sound)
- “hAy” as in the ‘e’ in “Jose”,
- “fEEt”, as in the ‘i’ in “Ferrari”,
- “glOw”, as in the ‘o’ in “hola”,
and less like:
- “cAp”,
- “pEt”,
- “fOnt”.
In English, we are blessed with such a chaotic blend of sounds and spellings, that English natives are already accustomed to a wide flexibility in accents. You’re from the southwest US? Cool, I can hear the accent. You’re from Newcastle, UK? Cool, can’t understand a word, but I can hear the accent.
In some accents, “au” sounds like “o” (which is called the “caught/cot” merger). If someone says to you, “I cot the ball”, there’s no way you’re thinking they’re talking about a small bed. Against the background of their accent, your brain is now ready to take all their “o” sounds and recognize that you may be understanding “au”.
(Other languages have regional accents as well, of course — from what I’ve seen they’re more related to pronunciation of consonants, leaving letters out, opening the mouth more or less, tonality, and vocabulary, but yes there is also variation in vowels).
So, your brain quickly adapts to English accents. When you hear someone turning every short vowel (every schwa) into long vowels, your brain says, “Ok, I’m hearing long but understanding short.”
When they say a shirt doesn’t fEEt well, you understand, “fit”. When they ask if they can “sEAt” in this chair — they’re not asking about a seat, they’re saying “sit”. Something fell in the “Pete”? No, it fell in the “pit”. Feet, seat, pete → fit, sit, pit.
Most of the time this is understandable and goes without issue. But then a word comes along that’s all too funny to hear wrong.
“I waint weeth theese main to zee beech”
Your brain hears long, and converts short:
“I wehnt with thihs mahn to the bihch”, or
“I went with this man to the bitch.”
Wait, why did we convert “beech”/”beach”? Look again — the problem never was with the word, “beach”, which we do indeed say as “beech”.
The problem was with every other short vowel in the sentence. Your brain converted all long vowels to short, even though “beach” is supposed to be long. It’s just so tempting to hear it short, as “bitch”, because it fits in with the rest of the sentence! (And, well, as soon as you hear it that way, you laugh, so it stands out).
The same goes for “sheet”. Someone “wantsa sheet on his bed”? If you hear an accent, you’re substituting long for short, and you think “shit”. But he said “sheet”. And “sheet” is correct.
In the video he also asks about having a “fork on the table.” In this case, yeah, it’s a mispronunciation of the English “r”, which is quite different from many other languages’ “r”, which is often rolled or tapped.
The English “r” is so soft that language learners often make a mistake, either rolling it hard, or missing it entirely. If you’re native English and learning Spanish, or vice versa, in fact, you are better off not thinking of them both as ‘r’s, but rather thinking of them as completely different letters. But more on that in the coming weeks.
