Question of the day.

What took you an embarrassing amount of time to figure out?

My answer:

Maybe not as much as embarrassing, but it took me quite long anyway and now I consider it funny, namely all the weird assumptions I had about some things in English. For example, even when I was already a reasonably good English speaker, I thought some words were pronounced different than they actually were, or that some words or phrases mean something different than they actually do. I can’t think of very many such things at this very moment but there have been quite a few and some pretty hilarious. I’m thinking maybe I’ll have to compile a list of such things whenever I’ll be reminded of them and then I’ll share it on here. 😀 Like, for ages I had no idea how the word queue is pronounced, and I pronounced it like CUE-wee. 😀 I think even some five years ago I still pronounced it like that. And I think I already wrote about it on here that, for the longest time, I thought niche was pronounced nee-SHAY, much like cliche is pronounced in Swedish and also apparently in English. 😀 As for cliche, I’m still not perfectly sure what syllable should be stressed in this word as I’ve heard both people who pronounce it as CLEE-shay, as well as such who say clee-SHAY, maybe it’s an accent thing, dunno. Oh, and now I’m remembering that it was only when I started having lessons with my English tutor before finals, he enlightened me that deaf is pronounced DEF rather than DEEF. 😀 At that point I was already immersing myself in spoken English a lot, nearly all the time, but must have not heard that word actually spoken before but now that I think of it it’s kind of weird that I wouldn’t have figured that out earlier since dead for example is also pronounced with a short eh rather than an ee. As far as phrases go, I used to think that if you’re cracked up means you’re depressed, kind of as in, you’re quite sad to begin with and then something else happens and it “cracks you up” and you’re properly devastated, something along these lines, when in fact it means to burst out with laughter. And like I said there have been many more things like this but I just can’t think of anything else at the moment.

You? 🙂