Talking about English pronunciation, its challenges and the future of English Hello again, today I would like to talk about the characteristics of English pronunciation. For me as a German speaker from Austria, some aspects of the English language are not completely alien to me, but I think that English pronunciation is quite hard to learn. There are so many different vowel sounds or vowel-consonant combinations that are very hard to produce the way native speakers do. Apart from that, sounds in English are often changing. For example the “th” sound can have lots of different – and not only two – sounds, depending on whether there is linking of multiple words involved or not. In addition, sounds in English are often represented with different letters. That makes it hard to learn English be reading. Also reading texts aloud is often a tedious task. Why so? Even though you may have a sound understanding of the language, you quite frequently have to stop in the middle of reading, because of words whose pronunciation or word stress you don't know. For those reasons, I consider English pronunciation as one of the hardest to learn I know. For me, even Chinese is easier to pronounce, not only because I spent many years learning it, but also because its phonemic inventory is relatively limited and the phonetic rules are very stable. But there is also a good – or bad, depends on how you see it – news: Listening to English native speekers from many different countries an backgrounds makes me realize, that lots of words are pronounced in many different ways by native speakers themselves. I think this is good news, because it makes us aware of the fact, that there is not only one way to pronounce something. Furthermore, it reveals that we should believe in artificial standards either, as though deviation of a certain standard disqualifies our English as a whole. I even doubt there is something like British or American English, of course you can make out some features, but accents already differ greatly in those countries. Moreover, the global spread of English made it transcend much more beyond its native community. I think that wanting to control this development is doomed to fail. But regardless of the degree of internationalisation of English, I also believe that there will continue to be a certain gap between English spoken by native speakers, and people who've learned English as a foreign language and just use it as a tool of communication in everyday life or at work. The future will show what direction English will head to! THANKS