My enemy, the /th/

Fear comes creeping into my mind as my soccer team forms a circle during warm-up to begin team stretching. For our stretching program, everybody does the same stretch while we one by one count out loud to ten in a counterclockwise direction. While everybody else focuses on doing the stretch correctly, the one thing I can think about is how I don’t want to have to be the one to yell out the number three. Five is fine, eight is alright, I’ll even be ok with my least favorite number six. But three I don’t want, for the simple reason that I cannot for the life of me pronounce /th/.

My teammate on the other side of our 34-girl-strong circle begins. “One,” she says, and so the counting begins. At this point, counting ahead to see which number I’ll be while also focusing on the stretch is impossible for me. I’m too stressed to figure it out so I reluctantly decide to leave it up to fate. The first time around the circle, the odds are in my favor. My number is five. For a moment I’m relieved, but I remind myself that it is not over yet. We do a total of 10 exercises, meaning that I will likely have to yell out two more numbers today.

So, the process begins again. Attempting to predict which number I will be. Giving up and leaving it to fate. Again, fate (or maybe just simple mathematics) prevents me from embarrassing myself. “Nine” is my next number and I gladly say it out loud.

A moment later, a realization hits me. Going from number five in the first round to number nine in the second means that I always skip six numbers. So, the dreaded scenario after all does come true once it is my turn again.

Left with no other choice, I yell “Free!” What a nightmare.

Feeling embarrassed by mispronouncing /th/ is a daily occurrence for me. Living in the US, I use words with /th/ in every conversation but almost every single time I end up pronouncing /th/ as an f or a t.

The process of exchanging /th/ for the easier version of f, t, and sometimes v is generally known as th-fronting. In the entire world, there is only a handful of languages that include th-sounds, most likely because it is a difficult sound for people to pronounce. Those growing up with /th/ tend to learn how to pronounce it in their childhood years but those learning English as a foreign language have to actively practice pronouncing it.

English is not my mother tongue. I grew up speaking German and only began learning English as a foreign language at the age of 10. The German language doesn’t use the letter combination /th/. In the beginning, my teachers attempted to teach us children how to pronounce it, but they never put enough of a focus on it that I would have learned how to say it correctly.

I didn’t realize that I was mispronouncing one of English’s most often-used letter combinations until I was told by a professor in my sophomore year of college in the US. While working on a project together, he suddenly remarked that in the two years he had known me, he had never realized that I am unable to pronounce /th/. He didn’t know that neither had I.

Even though this presents only a minor problem in the grand scheme of life, at that time it felt like a punch in the gut. Had I really been running around mispronouncing English words without realizing it for eleven years? Because of my realization, I suddenly felt self-conscious and a bit inadequate.

I thought about all of the people I’ve met and talked to in English over the last few years. I wondered if people generally noticed and whether they gave as much as a second thought about my problem. For reasons I cannot explain anymore today, at the time I especially worried how mispronouncing /th/ would go in my future career as a journalist. I thought about having to talk to hundreds of people in my career and all of them possibly not taking me seriously because of how unprofessional I sounded.

Most of all, the realization mentally catapulted me back to my childhood, when I had to attend German speech therapy lessons because I tended to pronounce the letter s with a lisp. Over several years, I was taught how to say it correctly, earning a pretty sticker as a reward from my teacher for every lesson I completed. In speech therapy, learning to not lisp meant learning to not touch my tongue to my teeth when I pronounced an /s/. I did successfully lose the lisp, but I seem to have lost it to an extent where I was unable to relearn the part of it that was needed for the English /th/.

When first learning English, I remember feeling uncomfortable during the few times my teacher wanted us to practice pronouncing /th/. For years, I had been told that pronouncing s with a lisp was incorrect which made me think of it as being somewhat embarrassing. Because of that, I couldn’t imagine that there actually was a language in which a lisp wasn’t embarrassing.

In recent years, I have not perceived it that way anymore, but at this point, I have spoken English for so long that mispronouncing the /th/ is a hard habit to break. When practicing pronouncing it correctly, I now face the issue of not knowing how to produce the sound at all. I also don’t really hear the difference between the way that native speakers say it and the way that I say it.

Because of all of that, I have given up on trying to pronounce it correctly. Today, I don’t see the issue as strongly as I did upon first learning /th/ and upon my first realization that I can’t pronounce it one and a half years ago. Even though I’m still hyper-aware of mispronouncing words with /th/, I mostly make fun of my issue now, especially because it leads to some hilarious moments. Words like thriller, Thor, and three are only some of the words my friends have to decipher on a day-to-day basis.

Mostly, I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t notice or simply don’t care that I pronounce things (quite literally) incorrectly. There is usually enough context for people to know what I’m talking about and if not, they will just ask if I can repeat what I said.

So what if I announce “free” instead of the number or ironically the number “four” instead of the superhero?! Having a problem articulating certain sounds in another language should not be seen as an embarrassment. Acquiring a foreign language is hard work and one can be proud of being able to speak it fluently, even if it is not perfect. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much whether others hear my difficulty with /th/ as long as they can understand what I’m trying to tell them.

My resolution for the next practice: I will not attempt to predict which number I’ll have to say out loud. I will not let anxiety take a hold of my brain. Instead, I will make sure to extra proudly announce “free” when it is my turn to count out loud. Take that, /th/!

My enemy, the /th/

Fear comes creeping into my mind as my soccer team forms a circle during warm-up to begin team stretching. For our stretching program, everybody does the same stretch while we one by one count out loud to ten in a counterclockwise direction. While everybody else focuses on doing the stretch correctly, the one thing I can think about is how I don’t want to have to be the one to yell out the number three. Five is fine, eight is alright, I’ll even be ok with my least favorite number six. But three I don’t want, for the simple reason that I cannot for the life of me pronounce /th/.

My teammate on the other side of our 34-girl-strong circle begins. “One,” she says, and so the counting begins. At this point, counting ahead to see which number I’ll be while also focusing on the stretch is impossible for me. I’m too stressed to figure it out so I reluctantly decide to leave it up to fate. The first time around the circle, the odds are in my favor. My number is five. For a moment I’m relieved, but I remind myself that it is not over yet. We do a total of 10 exercises, meaning that I will likely have to yell out two more numbers today.

So, the process begins again. Attempting to predict which number I will be. Giving up and leaving it to fate. Again, fate (or maybe just simple mathematics) prevents me from embarrassing myself. “Nine” is my next number and I gladly say it out loud.

A moment later, a realization hits me. Going from number five in the first round to number nine in the second means that I always skip six numbers. So, the dreaded scenario after all does come true once it is my turn again.

Left with no other choice, I yell “Free!” What a nightmare.

Feeling embarrassed by mispronouncing /th/ is a daily occurrence for me. Living in the US, I use words with /th/ in every conversation but almost every single time I end up pronouncing /th/ as an f or a t.

The process of exchanging /th/ for the easier version of f, t, and sometimes v is generally known as th-fronting. In the entire world, there is only a handful of languages that include th-sounds, most likely because it is a difficult sound for people to pronounce. Those growing up with /th/ tend to learn how to pronounce it in their childhood years but those learning English as a foreign language have to actively practice pronouncing it.

English is not my mother tongue. I grew up speaking German and only began learning English as a foreign language at the age of 10. The German language doesn’t use the letter combination /th/. In the beginning, my teachers attempted to teach us children how to pronounce it, but they never put enough of a focus on it that I would have learned how to say it correctly.

I didn’t realize that I was mispronouncing one of English’s most often-used letter combinations until I was told by a professor in my sophomore year of college in the US. While working on a project together, he suddenly remarked that in the two years he had known me, he had never realized that I am unable to pronounce /th/. He didn’t know that neither had I.

Even though this presents only a minor problem in the grand scheme of life, at that time it felt like a punch in the gut. Had I really been running around mispronouncing English words without realizing it for eleven years? Because of my realization, I suddenly felt self-conscious and a bit inadequate.

I thought about all of the people I’ve met and talked to in English over the last few years. I wondered if people generally noticed and whether they gave as much as a second thought about my problem. For reasons I cannot explain anymore today, at the time I especially worried how mispronouncing /th/ would go in my future career as a journalist. I thought about having to talk to hundreds of people in my career and all of them possibly not taking me seriously because of how unprofessional I sounded.

Most of all, the realization mentally catapulted me back to my childhood, when I had to attend German speech therapy lessons because I tended to pronounce the letter s with a lisp. Over several years, I was taught how to say it correctly, earning a pretty sticker as a reward from my teacher for every lesson I completed. In speech therapy, learning to not lisp meant learning to not touch my tongue to my teeth when I pronounced an /s/. I did successfully lose the lisp, but I seem to have lost it to an extent where I was unable to relearn the part of it that was needed for the English /th/.

When first learning English, I remember feeling uncomfortable during the few times my teacher wanted us to practice pronouncing /th/. For years, I had been told that pronouncing s with a lisp was incorrect which made me think of it as being somewhat embarrassing. Because of that, I couldn’t imagine that there actually was a language in which a lisp wasn’t embarrassing.

In recent years, I have not perceived it that way anymore, but at this point, I have spoken English for so long that mispronouncing the /th/ is a hard habit to break. When practicing pronouncing it correctly, I now face the issue of not knowing how to produce the sound at all. I also don’t really hear the difference between the way that native speakers say it and the way that I say it.

Because of all of that, I have given up on trying to pronounce it correctly. Today, I don’t see the issue as strongly as I did upon first learning /th/ and upon my first realization that I can’t pronounce it one and a half years ago. Even though I’m still hyper-aware of mispronouncing words with /th/, I mostly make fun of my issue now, especially because it leads to some hilarious moments. Words like thriller, Thor, and three are only some of the words my friends have to decipher on a day-to-day basis.

Mostly, I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t notice or simply don’t care that I pronounce things (quite literally) incorrectly. There is usually enough context for people to know what I’m talking about and if not, they will just ask if I can repeat what I just said.

Having a problem articulating certain sounds in another language, in the end, should not be seen as an embarrassment. Acquiring a foreign language is hard work and one can be proud of being able to speak it fluently, even if it is not perfect.

In a continuation of its modern armada of self-produced movies, Netflix dished out another low-quality thriller named End of the Road. The movie’s creators seemed to have put a lot of effort into finding a brand-new idea for a thriller but ended up with an increasingly unrealistic and abstract plot that is anything but thrilling. From forced seeming social issues like racism, over graphic moments of violence, to attempts at comedic relief and unrelated moments of sadness – the creators of End of The Road wanted to do too much and delivered too little.

End of the Road is a freshly released Netflix thriller about a Californian single mother, her brother, and her two kids, who have to foreclose their house and move to Texas after the children’s father died. During their three days long road trip through the desert, the family becomes witness to a murder and subsequently gets pulled into a fight for their lives against a mysterious drug boss.

The movie which was released in September 2022 is directed by Millicent Shelton who is mostly known for directing episodes of the show Titans. End of the Road stars anything but an A-list cast, with the main characters being rappers Queen Latifah and Ludacris. Both have starred in movies before but have not come to fame because of their acting experiences. On Rotten Tomatoes, End of the Road reached a whopping 33% on the “Tomatometer” and an audience score of 16%.

This low score can not only be attributed to the poor acting of rappers turned actors. In its 90 minutes of running time, a hundred things happen, but barely any of them contribute to the main storyline.

On their trip across the desert, the black Californian family is confronted with a case of extreme racism, which then, however, plays little role in the main plot. Meanwhile, for a hint of family drama, the family members’ behaviors, reactions, and problems are continuously artificially related to the death of the main character’s husband. While the other main characters’ behaviors are still somewhat understandable, though, everything the uncle of the children says and does seems unrealistic and forced.

The same goes for the dialogues between the characters which are lacking authenticity and seem artificially created with the sole purpose of connecting scenes with each other. Most of the topics the family talked about felt like they were included because they foreshadow the issues and reactions that are to follow. Because of these descriptive dialogues, while it increases in abstractness, the plot also becomes oddly predictable.

The one good thing about the movie was the scenic shots of the desert and the choice of this location. The rough terrain of the desert adds more feeling of danger to the movie than any of the evil antagonistic characters could elicit. Because of this small positive factor, the movie deserves 1 out of four stars.

Overall, Netflix will need to reevaluate what is more important – the 10^th released thriller of the month or the creation of actually valuable films. Otherwise, the strategy of quantity over quality might become the End of the Road for their self-produced movies.

Home To-Go

For national and international migrants, there is no harder question to answer than “Where is home?” or “Where are you from?” Generally, some people consider home to be a place or building while others think of home as certain people. Some might even consider home to be a feeling.  For expatriates and national migrants in particular, the concept of home is most often fluid and goes beyond the scope of a singular place or person.

22-year-old international student Rena Ketelsen is one of those who have uprooted their lives to try their luck in another country. The urge to leave her home country had been living in her heart for as long as she could remember. While most of her high school classmates decided to remain in Germany after graduation, she didn’t feel the need to stay. So, she decided to enroll in Morningside University in the United States and start a new adventure as an international student.

“The reason why I came to the US is just because I wanted to try something completely different” Rena recalled and added that another big part in her decision was to get away from home. Further reminiscing about her decision, she said, “I think everybody at some point wants to get away from their family. I just went as far away as I could.”

Rena’s move to the US was not the first time she had changed her address. Originally, she was born in Birmingham, England but at the age of three her family moved to Germany. In Germany, the Ketelsens then changed cities another two times and finally ended up in Wrestedt a year before Rena came to the US. This has made 15 years the longest period that Rena has ever lived in the same place.

What does home mean to a person like Rena whose location of home has changed more than just once?

Lounging on the couch in the living room of her on-campus apartment in the US, Rena reached a conclusion, “I don’t really have one home. My home is here at Morningside University. I’ve lived here for over three years. But at the same time obviously my parents, my parents’ house, my siblings, just Germany in general is also home because I’ve lived there all my life.” Home to her, she found, “is mostly the people” rather than a specific place.

Answering the question of home becomes an even more complicated task when one considers factors like the feeling of national belonging or geographical technicalities such as borders. One to know that struggle is international student Annemiek Goedhart who is from a German town called Emmerich right on the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

Despite having lived at her parent’s house in Germany almost her entire life, she said “I usually say I’m from the Netherlands because it’s easier.” Thinking about it more deeply she added that she considers herself Dutch mainly because of her family’s origins but also because she spent the majority of her time in a Dutch city near the border. Both her school and her soccer club were in the Netherlands which resulted in most of her social contacts being Dutch as well.

No matter her national identity, however, until she moved to the US for college, she had always considered her home the place where she lived with her family. “The first semester, the US definitely felt just as kind of a second home,” Annemiek contemplated how her concept of home changed with her move. “But then after that, I realized that I was like, “Oh, can we go home?” and it’d be Dimmitt.” Sitting in the formal lounge of said residence hall on Morningside University’s campus, she added, “I feel like this is my home right now. But then whenever I go home, it never really feels like I left.”

Because of that, similar to Rena, Annemiek also thinks of home as more than just one place or person. “I think it’s more the people I’m surrounded with,” she said and explained that while being in the US, she misses her family but when going home for break, she finds herself missing her friends from college.

In the end, Annemiek, Rena, and the rest of the 272 million expatriates worldwide have one tool that enables them to stay in touch with whatever their definition of home is – video chatting. For Annemiek, this tool has made it easier to cope with being away from home for so long. “I think especially because of FaceTime and all the other technology we have right now it’s really easy to stay in touch,” Annemiek said and added that she just calls her parents whenever she wants to connect to her German/Dutch home.

Video chatting may not provide an easier answer to the question of where a person’s home is. However, it certainly gives national and international migrants the possibility to connect and combine their several concepts of home into their own unique and fluid version of it.

The result? A portable and personalized version of home. In other words, a home to-go.

Home is where the heart is… or something like that

For national and international migrants, there is almost no harder question to answer than “Where is home?” or “Where are you from?” Generally, some people consider home to be a place or building while others think of home as certain people. Some might even consider home to be a feeling.  For expatriates and national migrants, in particular, the concept of home is most often fluid and not tied to a singular place or person.

22-year-old international student Rena Ketelsen is one of those who have uprooted their lives to try their luck in another country. The urge to leave her home country had been living in her heart for as long as she could remember. While most of her high school classmates decided to remain in Germany after graduation, she didn’t feel the need to stay. So, she decided to enroll in Morningside University in the United States and start a new adventure as an international student.

“The reason why I came to the US is just because I wanted to try something completely different” Rena recalled and added that another big part of her decision had to do with getting away from home. Further reminiscing about her decision, she said, “I think everybody at some point wants to get away from their family. I just went as far away as I could.”

Rena’s move to the US was not the first time she had changed her address. Originally, she was born in Birmingham, England but at the age of three, her family moved to Germany. In Germany, the Ketelsens then changed cities another two times and finally ended up in Wrestedt a year before Rena came to the US. This has made 15 years the longest period that Rena has ever lived in the same place.

So, what does home mean to a person like Rena Ketelsen whose location of home has changed more than just once?

Rena generally thinks that “Whenever you go somewhere, you lose a piece of yourself there – even if it’s just a week.” The result, she said, is that “I don’t really have one home. My home is here at Morningside University. I’ve lived here for over three years. But at the same time obviously, my parents, my parents’ house, my siblings, just Germany, in general, is also home because I’ve lived there all my life.” Home to her, in the end “is mostly the people” rather than a specific place.

Answering the question of home becomes an even more complicated task when one considers factors like the feeling of national belonging or geographical technicalities such as borders. One to know that struggle is international student Annemiek Goedhart who is from a German town called Emmerich right on the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

Despite having lived at her parent’s house in Germany almost her entire life, she said “I usually say I’m from the Netherlands because it’s easier.” Thinking about it more deeply she added that she considers herself Dutch mainly because of her family’s origins but also because she spent the majority of her time in a Dutch city near the border. Both her school and her soccer club were in the Netherlands which resulted in most of her social contacts being Dutch as well.

No matter her national identity, however, until she moved to the US for college, she had always considered her home the place where she lived with her family. “The first semester, the US definitely felt just as kind of a second home,” Annemiek said about how her concept of home changed with her move. “But then after that, I realized that I was like, “Oh, can we go home?” and it’d be Dimmitt.” She added, “I feel like this [Morningside University] is my home right now. But then whenever I go home, it never really feels like I left.”

Because of that, similar to Rena, Annemiek also thinks of home as more than just one place or person. “I think it’s more the people I’m surrounded with,” she said and explained that while being in the US she misses her family but when going home for break, she finds herself missing her friends from college.

In the end, Annemiek, Rena, and the rest of the 272 million expatriates worldwide have one tool that enables them to stay in touch with whatever their definition of home is – video chatting. That may not provide an easier answer to the question of where their home is. However, it certainly gives them the possibility to connect and combine their several concepts of home into their unique version of it.