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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Asklemmy
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Ask a German to pronounce “squirrel.”
The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce "Eichhörnchen."
Eye-ch-urn-ken?
Irish and we have that gutteral Ch sound in Irish so I feel like it's a cheat code for us.
None of those ch's are guttural and you skipped an h;)
So.... eye-ch-churn-chen?
First bit like Ike (edit: or Reich)
The ch digraph in both instances of Eichhörnchen is pronounced closer to the way you pronounce the first consonant in the word "hue". It's closer to the front of the mouth than the one you're thinking of in Irish. It's ç in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's a different sound than the other way that ch is pronounced in German and has to do with what sounds/letters appear around it. The other pronunciation of ch in German is normally pronounced as x (this sound is the one you're thinking of that's in Irish) or χ.
That's really clear, thanks. I learned a lot, including learning that I should not try to pronounce Eichhörnchen. :)
he last is more -chun
Or a French person.
This one's actually funny to me. It's a bit of a meme that francophones struggle with squirrel and anglophones struggle with écureuil, but I personally had no trouble with it. You just have to hear it once.
My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that's very impressive if true. It doesn't help that in my accent, it's pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I've heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.
Or a person
Is it tricky? English is my first language and it doesn’t seem difficult to me, but I never gave it much thought. So fascinating.
It only has a single vowel, which is an r-coloured vowel...which most languages don't have. For that matter, many languages don't even have our "r" sound, so colouring a vowel with "r" is incredibly hard when you don't even have that consonant to colour with!
Not to mention that after using that r-coloured vowel, you have a semi-syllabic L immediately afterwards. (Is squirrel one syllable or two? Depends on who you ask I guess!). As you may know, L and R are the same in some languages. And even if a language has both AND pronounces them the same ways as English (not necessarily common), they might not allow an L to follow an R! (Just like how we don't allow R to follow an L)
Oh, and which vowel are we colouring? "i" or the "short I". This is a very rare vowel, following a third dimension (tenseness) that the majority of other vowels don't use. Not common in other languages, either!
So that's the last two sounds.
The first three is a consonant cluster containing another uncommon consonant (w). And even ignoring that, s and k can't always be combined together in other languages.
So literally every sound in the word "squirrel" has something foreign and rare about it to many languages immediately as you start to get past that "s" sound. Brutal.
It's not the trickiest, but it's not exactly easy to say it like the native speakers.
What's the problem with Skouirrelle? :^)