The two big sounds in hebrew that don't exist in american english are ch and r. This ch is probably the most recognizable sound in hebrew, if you ever hear someone speaking and they say this sound often they are likely speaking hebrew, or arabic to a lesser extent. Even if you don't know anything about Hebrew you probably know words that are meant to be said with this sound. Hannukah, an important jewish holiday that every american has likely at least heard of can also be written Channukah since the first sound is the hebrew ch. The sound itself is like an H that is choked in the back of the throat. It isn't very pretty, but it is important and sounds scary if you need to yell at someone. My language partner reminded me that a big mistake that foreigners make when pronouncing this letter is focusing too hard in it. Since americans usually have little difficulty with the rest of the word, we often overpronounce the ch since we are thinking of getting that one part right. The more native pronunciation is relaxed and not so exaggerated. Here are some words I know that use ch:
nachon - right as in yes you are right
achi - bro
ochev - eat
ma shlom cha - whats up
The other difficult sound is an r. Because the american r is very unique, we often have a difficult time learning other languages version of the letter. Hebrew's is deep in the throat, untrilled (unlike arabic) and similar to the french r as far as I can tell. Not every r is pronounced this way however - so far it seems like r at the beginning of a word is more similar to ours, as in "raba." One funny story I heard about this letter from an Israeli soldier : she spent about three years in America growing up and therefore had a pretty American r while speaking English. She told me that she could never fall in love with anybody who pronounced r the Hebrew way because she found it so extremely ugly. A word with this r sound:
perot - fruit
That's actually all i know so far because this sound is much less common than ch. Also I don't like pronouncing it so maybe I skip some of the words with it in it.
Comments
Interesting post, Chester. Remember to use brackets to help differentiate sounds from spellings. Now that we've seen an expanded view of the IPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_chart_2018.pdf), what symbols would most closely approximate the two sounds identified in your post?