French girl trying to pronounce English words shows how hard it is to say one letter and people are stunned
Topics: TikTok, Viral, Food and Drink, France, Community
Stefania Sarrubba
Featured Image Credit: Tiktok/@tatatopsecret
Topics: TikTok, Viral, Food and Drink, France, Community
A French TikToker struggling to repeat one English word has sent the Internet down an accent spiral.
TikTok user @tatatopsecret has been posting videos where she, a French native speaker, challenges herself trying and repeating English words.
In a food-themed clip, she appears to be stuck on a specific term, looking increasingly frustrated as she doesn’t seem to get it quite right. Her content has gone viral, with her food pronunciation challenge racking up 796k likes at the time of writing.
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"I really like this french girl on tiktok the only thing she does is post these videos of her trying to pronounce english words and idk she is just such a diva i love her," one person noted on Twitter/X.
"No one could have prepared me for that Oreo pronunciation," was another comment.
While @tatatopsecret finally manages to complete the pronunciation test — finishing off on a quite unexpected pronunciation of Oreo — her struggle with the word ‘burger’ has made many English native speakers reflect on how difficult it can be to reproduce the English /r/ sound for those learning it as a second language.
"Always the hard R," one user noted, acknowledging the difficulty in reproducing the sound.
"Lol love it. Have fun with R’s I’ll keep saying croissant with a hard [R]," someone else said.
"Accents are so weird to me cause like what’s preventing you from saying it right," was another comment.
French and English have very different ways to pronounce the /r/ sound. The struggle goes both ways, so while a French-speaking person may have a hard time ordering a burger, good luck to English native speakers trying and getting a croissant in a Parisian boulangerie (Emily in Paris, we see you).
This happens because the sound originates in different areas of the mouth in the two languages.
French speakers normally pronounce their R’s in the back of their throats, producing a slight vibration. This friction is typical of fricative consonants, which are the results of pushing air through a narrow - but not completely closed - opening.
In English, the R’s are pronounced just behind the alveolar ridge with no vibration of the tongue.
Of course, there are some other variations of the /r/ sound in other languages, and different English variants can pronounce it differently too, or not at all — think of rhothic and non-rhothic accents.
"It's partially physiological (your vocal chords, lips, tongue, and other speech-involved body parts are muscles and they don't have the muscle memory required) and partially cognitive (imagine trying to read backwards or skipping every other letter),” one user suggested on X.