I misspell things on a daily basis. English is pretty bad in this way. I didn't realize how bad English is until I started studying Spanish and Korean. I'd say a lot of Americans don't realize that spelling shouldn't be hard. Most people in the US (75% estimated, no one knows) are monolingual sadly so I'd say a lot of people don't know how bad it is until you explain it to them. But even then, they just shrug. What are they supposed to do about it?
The English classes I remember as a kid didn't ever compare English to anything. It was studying grammar trees and famous books. I think it would have been more interesting if it was like a world religions thing.
Just today I spelled plaguing three ways until I got it right and I'm a native English speaker. Other words I get wrong or have to slow down to type/write: privilege, February, occasionally.
How do I check? How do I find out if I'm right? I just did this today: I googled for "Neil degrasse Tyson" to see if I spelled it correctly. I don't know how to spell his whole name. English first names are pretty common. So I know "neil" and "tyson". Sometimes last names are already other words, like West, Burns, Bush, Love. In that case, you get lucky.
Unknown words aren't very common for native speakers honestly. Reading is the easiest thing. I read Spanish the best and can hardly produce it. Some people would call fancy words "SAT words". SAT is a national test with a vocabulary section in the U.S. (I don't know if this is well-known). It's another way of saying "overly fancy" or "show off" words. Maybe the person is just trying to demonstrate how smart they are or maybe they really do use "SAT words" often. From person to person, it's hard to say. To this point, there are common words and then "fancy words" to some extent. At some level of education, I'd say there are very rarely uncommon words for native English speakers but this is just an anecdote.
If you make up new words, you find that the rules fall apart and English shows it's true confusing nature. I've used this example in the past. Take these two words: tainted and mountain. How do you pronounce this new word: mountainted. Most people I've asked say "moun-tane-ted" even though mountain is "moun-ten".
English is mostly written/read rather than spoken/heard – Ormoz – 2015-09-26T10:37:07.993
Non-native speaker who became fluent. Most of it for me comes from having encountered those words before, and the words I don't know are usually more complex ones (i.e. not from Old English but from Latin or Greek) that I can figure out with basic prefix/suffix patterns. – user3932000 – 2016-04-14T04:12:07.013
I don't know how right they were but when French car company Renault started selling in USA they pronounced it the way it is written as we all tend to and not as "Runoo" or "Re-no" which is its actual French pronunciation. – Rolen Koh – 2016-12-15T05:03:06.300
86The native speakers who told you that are wrong. – snailplane – 2014-10-19T07:47:51.407
37You might as well ask the converse question at the same time: how can native English speakers spell words correctly? Answer: they don't. – 200_success – 2014-10-19T07:57:53.177
4This is an exaggeration! There are some letter patterns and some vocabulary roots out there to help but in no way can they pronounce any word with certainty. – learner – 2014-10-19T10:59:20.943
31
Maybe you want to ask those native speakers to read aloud this: http://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html
– Matthias – 2014-10-19T21:55:41.7733@Matthias Signed up just to upvote your comment. That's solid gold! – Angew is no longer proud of SO – 2014-10-20T08:06:17.107
16Even the best English linguist will make mistakes in some word - it's true that an educated native speaker can guess/work out the vast majority of words from experience and similar words, but there is absolutely no way to be sure. Even linguistic areas for which there are 'rules' have exceptions. It's the weakness of the language when learning it, but also perhaps the most English thing about it – Jon Story – 2014-10-20T08:50:51.637
1
no, they don't pronounce it correctly https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-famous-names-of-people-and-places-that-are-constantly-mispronounced
– phuclv – 2014-10-20T09:39:28.5807
@Matthias: As I could not find an attribution on the linked site: This poem is The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
– Wrzlprmft – 2014-10-20T12:05:12.97323I am a native English speaker (born and lived there for 25 years) with multiple university degrees, and I regularly mis-pronounce unfamiliar and uncommon words, and the occasional fairly-common word too.
I suspect that the people you had asked have never read anything particularly complicated, or were fibbing a bit. – Mark K Cowan – 2014-10-20T12:07:28.310
1@Wrzlprmft The author is mentioned at the very end, but the title is indeed missing. Thanks for adding this. I didn't know the title myself before. – Matthias – 2014-10-20T12:19:01.347
4On an advanced level, English words usually are phonetic. The true exceptions to this, such as the words "one" and "Wednesday", are almost always basic vocabulary and are learned early on. Other words, even if they don't look or come across like they're phonetic, ultimately are phonetic from a pretty intricate, etymology-based system underlying their spellings, and this system is gradually picked up on by people who speak English. Essentially you'll notice a word's spelling falls into one "style" or another, and you'll use that style's phonetics to figure out the word's pronunciation. – Panzercrisis – 2014-10-20T17:09:09.503
6To those who wish to close this question as "too broad" or "primarily opinion based": I disagree, mainly because the answer happens to be "they can't". If it were possible but difficult, then it would have been too broad. – 200_success – 2014-10-20T18:23:24.110
3If you know the etymology of the word (did it come from French, or German, or Latin?) then you have a better chance at guessing (guestimating?) the pronunciation, but that doesn't mean you're right. I'm a native speaker too, like @MarkKCowan, and I also mis-pronounce unfamiliar words. – Ming – 2014-10-21T01:15:26.573
8
One word: ghoti
– Dennis – 2014-10-21T04:33:47.2872I probably pronounce Estonian more clearly than English (ignoring my accent), despite spending only 10 months there (and counting) vs. 25 years in the UK. If only Estonian grammar was as simple as the pronunciation... – Mark K Cowan – 2014-10-21T06:46:33.540
2@Dennis I thing you're ghoti-ing for upvotes there :D – Mark K Cowan – 2014-10-21T06:48:22.793
3
Ask those native speakers how the would pronounce the Dunning-Kruger effect.
– Zano – 2014-10-22T12:21:48.7801I once moved to a town where the people living there couldn't even agree about the proper pronunciation of the town's name... In addition, my last name is quite rare, and the people in the UK with that last name come from three very different ethnicities. So I have no idea how the other two would pronounce the same name. – gnasher729 – 2014-10-23T16:24:02.410