Hardest phoneme you’ve ever faced (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Hardest phoneme you’ve ever faced
Tags: Phonetics \| Difficulty \| Pronunciation
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48 messages over 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

mick33
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United States
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Message 41 of 48

01 March 2012 at 6:18pm | IP Logged

Zireael wrote:

mick33 wrote:

In the last month I have discovered a few more troublesome phonemes, and all of them come from Polish. My tongue, and vocal chords, cannot currently pronounce cz, dż, rz, sz, and ż as different sounds, even though they clearly are different sounds. I like listening to spoken Polish, so hopefully I will eventually work out how to pronounce these sounds.

Actually, rz and ż represent the same sound. Unless you meant ź.

You're right, I did mean ź.
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Марк
Senior Member
Russian Federation
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Speaks: Russian*

Message 42 of 48

01 March 2012 at 8:10pm | IP Logged

Patchy wrote:

Tenerife, Spain.

The Russian ы was and still is a bit of a struggle for me, in that I'm never completely
sure that I'm saying it right each time, although it's not a big deal to comprehension.

The good thing about all the difficult phonemes discussed here is that at least the
learners are aware of them.
If only this were true of Irish Gaelic, in which at least 90% of the learners are never
informed or never find out about a bunch of "difficult" consonant sounds, so that any
revival in the language is actually not really a revival at all in that many of the key
consonantal phonemes are not being learned, while the learners (being nearly all native
speakers of English) assume that the actual distinguishing features are in the
adjoining vowels.
An example:
The distinguishing phonetic feature between 'gabhar' ('goat') and 'gabhair' ('goats')
is only in which type of R is used, there being two completely different R-phonemes in
the language.
The adjoining written vowels are simply markers for this consonant change, but
learners; being unaware of this; try to differentiate in the vowel sounds, which is not
really possible as they lie (or should lie) in an unstressed and therefore neutral
(schwa) position.
The same goes with the two sounds represented by the letters L, M, N, B, C, D, F, G, P,
and T.
Most learners and self-proclaimed speakers do not pronounce both the velarised and
palatised ('broad' and 'narrow') phonemes of each of most of these dual-value letters.
Some of these sounds are quite a challenge to learners, but are actually even more
important to pronunciation distinctions than the very similar 'dark' and 'light'
duality of most Russian consonants.
But at least the learners of Russian are aware of them, and so can put in the time and
effort to get it right.
For some mysterious reason most learners and "teachers" of Gaelic seem unaware of their
existence.
Therefore, I reckon that for many people some of these sounds; for example the broad
Gaelic L; are doubly difficult.
Does the same situation of difficulty combined with ignorance happen with the learning
of any other minority languages out there?

'Just a thought,
Patchy.

Where are you from? From Ireland? I had the same impression and it shocked me. Wrong
pronunciation makes their speech ungrammatical.
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Hampie
Diglot
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Sweden
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Message 43 of 48

03 March 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged

slhdn wrote:

Georgian ejective consonants. Especially /q'/.

Though I don't learn Georgian I find ejective consonants kind of hard to make. They either sound like I try to hard
and am I about to trow up, or not at all. my /k'/ sounds like /q/ and my /t'/ ends up like a retroflex for some
reason.
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Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
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Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

Message 44 of 48

22 April 2012 at 6:01pm | IP Logged

I have a list of favourite sounds in different languages:

Czech:
the famous and dreaded ř.

Polish:
ć, ś, ź as opposed to cz, sz, and ż.

Swedish:
the sje-sound [ɧ], though I mastered this one after some practice (I think...)

Icelandic:
voiceless l, m, n, and r, and especially ll, which is pronounced [tl̥] with a voiceless plosive sound - really took some practice to get that right. O yes, nearly forgot pre-aspiration of consonant clusters! Combine these two and you get words like 'vatn' ('water'), which is pronounced [vaʰtn̥] - with a voiceless 'n' at the end. I'm still not sure if I'm doing it right...
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Mae
Trilingual Octoglot
Pro Member
Germany
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Message 45 of 48

22 April 2012 at 6:17pm | IP Logged

I don't have trouble pronouncing háčeks, but I do have trouble trying to generate the click consonants of Xhosa!
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LaughingChimp
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4699 days ago
346 posts - 594 votes

Speaks: Czech*

Message 46 of 48

22 April 2012 at 11:49pm | IP Logged

Definitely /ŋ/, especially between vowels.

Majka wrote:

As already mentioned here - the Czech ř.

I am native speaker and despite 3 different speech therapists (at preschool, at primary school and before starting university) couldn't master it 100%. I got very close but in some words one can still hear the difference.

Which one are you trying to learn? The trilled one or the fricative one? AFAIK therapists usually try to teach you the trilled one even though it's not how most people pronounce it today and it's more difficult than the untrilled one.
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Sebed
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 4739 days ago
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Speaks: English*
Studies: French, Korean, Esperanto

Message 47 of 48

03 May 2012 at 4:39pm | IP Logged

The first foreign language I tried to self-teach was Russian when I was 12 or so. I gave up when I realised that I wasn't trilling the front of my tongue, I'd just adapted the French r sound (which I've always managed without a problem) to make it more 'trilly'. Even now, I can't roll my r's, and it's stopped me from seriously considering studying Swedish as a result.
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hrhenry
Octoglot
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Message 48 of 48

03 May 2012 at 6:25pm | IP Logged

slhdn wrote:

Georgian ejective consonants. Especially /q'/.

That's been that hardest I've come up against too ("ყ"). It's difficult for me to produce without sounding like I'm stuttering.

R.
==

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