Does English language stand special in terms of phonology?

Question

I am a native Russian speaker.

When I am listening to songs and music in other languages, which I do not know, such as Italian, Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, and even Japanese, Finnish, Kyrgyz and Hebrew, I usually can write what I hear with Russian letters (with possibly adding 1 to 3 additional characters for sounds not present in Russian).

But that is not the case with English. When listening to English songs I can barely understand anything even though I can write and read in English well. Even more, I cannot even write down what I hear, I do not recognize usual vowels and consonants, as if they were singing with extraterrestrial non-human sounds or if it was just a noise rather than human speech.

Is English so special in terms of phonology?

Notice that this is not a question about spelling, English spelling is another big story.

Answer 1

Problems to listen English seems to be common among Russian native speakers (and me definitely isn't exception), and yes, it's harder to listen English than some another languages as in your examples. I'd post my answer mainly to confirm that it's not solely your issue, and to place some accents; the issue implementation may differ but it's very common to Russian natives, as far as I see and I'm told by friends and various mates. My personal implementation of it seems also influenced by Soviet school specifics which gave too few skills of listening of real native speech (not the one produced by teachers or specially trained dictors), and this one-sided teaching lead to prevailing of the written speech over the oral one (this seems noted by @Damkerng T.)

Detailedly, the English features that I detected at my personal experience and which affects understanding of oral speech are:

I. General "inexactness" of sounds which is of another kind than in Russian. For example, Russian never mutates /t/ to kind of /r/ or even to nothing. English vowels can easily shift to their neighbours, e.g. [æ] to [a] or [e], even under stress, which is impossible in Russian. (They shift even in phonetic courses, immediately when a dictor loses control on his/her pronounciation details.)

This also includes shifts of implementation base (sorry for possible mis-terming). E.g. /d/ in English is less voiced than in Russian, and /t/ is more loud; this difference in exhalation power is sometimes more important than voicedness (e.g. some German dialects lose voicedness but continue to differ t-weak and t-hard). It's normal to hear a sound which we treat as /t/ but which is really /d/.

II. Loss of difference. Some sounds are differentiated (for us!) only with length which is generally lost in songs, so the difference disappears (e.g. /ʌ/ vs. /a:/). Also, some differences which are supported to average Russian speaker only with r-coloring, can disappear.

III. General inability to detect words quickly (simply because not trained for this). There are numerous omonyms which are detected as some accustomed word but really shall be others (e.g. sum vs. some, hare vs. hair, etc.)

IV. Dialect differences which aren't often described. For example, some time ago I was unable to detect phrase which was "must have had" but pronounced like /məstəvəd/ at the same time that this speaker had kept /h/ in words like "happy".

The factor which deepens this is that English, unlike Russian, doesn't have a single "canonic" form, so you could hear different accents and dialects when you have no time to spend thinking what does it mean. It's quite rare to hear a Russian song which isn't of ethnic genre but performed using dialect pronounciation; exceptions could be counted using a single hand fingers (В.Высоцкий, Сектор Газа...) English has no such centralization so each singer or speaker gives their own deposit to a "bank" of varieties. At the same time, we were generally taught some "generic" English which is based mainly on Oxford ("RP") dialect but with huge r-coloring, without some pecularities (as exact manner of [æ] or [ɜ:]), and with very limited vocabulary.

OTOH I guess that your description of the issue is too emotional. Very unlikely you could differ e.g. /t/ vs. /m/ in Spanish or Finnish and, at the same time, unable to do this in English. If you can't detect the exact word, you can start with phonematic recording of a speech, and then make a deduction of the source using your recording. This could be very helpful to start with understanding songs.

Answer 2

To solve the problem you will want to consider one issue at a time. As a starting point, In your position I'd first see whether it is the vowel system of English that is a stumbling block.

English could be considered special in that it has an unusually high number of vowel phonemes. Depending on the dialect, English vowels tend not to be pure vowels with a relatively steady formant trajectory, as are found in Spanish or Japanese. Instead, even the non-diphthongs tend to have a moving F1-F2 target. In some of the languages that I have studied that have large numbers of vowel phonemes, the target for producing the vowels tends to be more complex. I don't know, however, whether this is something that is of general significance. Languages such as Marshallese, which are reported to have very few vowel phonemes, can have complex rules for pronouncing them.

So to see if the issue is the vowel inventories, you might try listening to songs in languages with large numbers of vowels, e.g., Cantonese, Norwegian, etc., and see if you have the same difficulty.

Answer 3

Your problem is very curious. Before going to elaborate, I'd like to jump to my conclusion first: I have a hunch that perhaps it is because you've already known English, which is exactly the reason why you cannot understand most things in English songs.

This might seem to be mind-boggling, but after reviewing lots of things, and trying to think many possibilities, I really do think that it is exactly the reason.

Since I can't speak Russian, and have watched some movies in Russian maybe only three or four time up until now (and I had to read the subtitles every time), after reading your post, I thought that it might be because English is a stress-timed language, or may be because of the liaison in English ("do it" is usually pronounced "do-wit", for example), or may be the number of pure vowels. But a quick research on the web tells me that Russian is also a stress-timed language, also has liaison, and six raw vowels is not so few. (Though English has unusually many vowels, around 14-16.)

I read your original post again and again and finally it hit me. Your saying "I can write and read English well" gave me some clue. Also, the fact that you can "easily write it [the Romanian/Italian song] down" is another big clue.

I dare say that if you try listening to an English song again, but this time pretend to know nothing about English (you can treat it as some extraterrestrial sounds if you like), and then transcribe it, your transcription might be even closer to the original lyric than you might think!

EDIT:

To really answer the question Does English language stand special in terms of phonology?, I would say that every language is special in its own way. English might have unusually many vowels, and the liaison seems to be very strong, so strong that all syllables would appear as if they were merged together, even across word boundaries. This could trouble many non-native speakers. But other languages would have their own quirks as well.

Answer 4

I am a Japanese student who learns both English and Russian, so I can compare both languages as a "neutral" person, and I think the root cause of your problem is that the mechanics of English speech is very different from that of Russian speech.

English speech is a continuous flow with a varying intonation, like a song. Here is a random example from a movie: Scene. Listen how the guy says, "Now they are whispering we got a secret investigation going on." It is a continuous flow of vowels, which transform to each other; consonants are "superimposed" on that flow. English speech is like а long continuous meowing by a cat. To talk like a native English speaker, I do this: (1) Before saying a sentence, I first decide exactly what sentence I am going to say, (2) I breathe in a lot of air, (3) then I start breathing out and making a continuous "meowing," like a cat, superimposing consonants on the continuous flow of vowels. I say a sentence as a long single word, without any interruption of the flow, and I vary the intonation just as the guy in the video does. It is only after I stop saying the sentence that I make a short pause, during which I breathe in again. To talk like this, you need a focused and determined state of mind.

The mechanics of Russian speech is very different. It is based on consonants and is like a relaxed walk. You can say consonants with any pace, stop for a while, think a bit, then continue the sentence. You can breathe in and out when saying a sentence. You can make pauses between words. When I talk in Russian, I build my speech on consonants. In Russian speech, vowels are just ultra-short links connecting neighboring consonants. It is critical to pronounce all consonants distinctly and correctly, whilst you can be pretty careless with vowels because they are just very short links. You can say 'а' instead of 'o,' you can say 'э' instead of 'о,' and so on - no big deal. Let us consider this sentence: "На дворе трава, на траве дрова, не руби дрова на траве двора." When you say this, you pronounce all consonants accurately and distinctly and make pauses between words. Or let's consider this: "Устранить препятствия, затрудняющие усовершенствование процедуры освидетельствования." No English speaker would be able to pronounce this by using the English mechanics of speech. The key is to accurately and correctly say all consonants, not messing them up, and make all vowels very short.

Since the English mechanics of speech is very different from the Russian one, it is no wonder that English speech sounds "extraterrestrial" to you. If an English speaker says, "How are you, all right?" - this will sound to you like meowing of a cat, because it will be like a continuous flow, "howareyouallright." You are just not used to hearing such speech. You cannot easily break it into individual sounds. It is a flow. You have to learn to recognize flow patterns.

To understand English speech, you need a lot of experience in order to recognize flow patterns. There is no way around it. And you also need to mentally "tune your receiver" to the English mode of speech perception, that is, to temporarily forget all other languages you speak, in order not to use irrelevant habits of speech recognition.

I humbly hope that I as a "neutral" person was able to give a helpful insight and that my humble view will be useful for Russian speakers learning English.