Language Pronunciation, French, German, Polish and Czech

When you visit a hospital or public building in the USA you might see signs in both English and Spanish. In Canada in the capital, Ottawa, you you meet people in government offices who are bilingual in French and English. (But the accent is different from France.) In Belgium you see street signs in French and Flemish (Dutch).

In England at an NHS hospital I was surprised to see a sign not in the 12 languages of the European Union but several others.

Problems
1 What do foreign looking words mean?
2 Assuming you can read the letters of words in the same alphabet as English, how do you pronounce them?
3 Can I learn a language where the pronunciation and writing are the same - it would be easier to speak?

1 You can put individual words or short phrases, whole sentences of paragraphs from books or copy whole pages and columns of words into Google translate. Locate the language. On many websites a small flag you can click on will translate. Your computer also has a flag symbols and you can click on it and turn on another language. The same apples to many devices such as smart phones and satnavs.
2 Having identified a written language, hunt for pronunciation. This is on the first page of most phrase books and dictionaries. You can hear the words spoken by touching the loudspeaker or ear symbol in Wikipedia, and language courses such as duolingo.

Story
I went through the above sign in Northwick Park Hospital. I found:

1 Bom-vindo (Portuguese for welcome - like bon for good in French)
Soo dhawow (or dhawoow) is Somali for welcome.
witajcie is Polish for hello

2 Pronunciation
FRENCH
The diagonal up accent is rising, whilst the downward diagonal is falling. So the word élève, meaning secondary school pupil (high school pupil for Americans), would be pronounced ay as in pay, lev as in levitate.

The French emphasis is on the last syllable. They pronounce Paris, ignoring the last consonant, as Paree.

The French have difficulty with the English letter H. They are told to add the H, so they add it randomly. Our au pair girl once said, "you 'ave no air", when she meant "you have no hair", and "you have no hair" when she mean "you have no air".

GERMAN
Watch out for interchanged V and W.

SPANISH
Watch out for interchanged H and Y and J.
Watch out for C and S and TH.


Tips
MALAY (same as Indonesian)
Malay is phonetic - sounds like it is written. What you see is what you say.

CZECH is also phonetic.
Here's a handy guide to Czech pronunciation.
http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/csms/czpronounc2.html

(More to be added later.)

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, teacher and turn of English and other languages. See my other posts, profiles and blogs in blogger.com, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTuber. Please follow me, like my pages and share your favourites. Look at my books on Lulu.com and Amazon