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What language is difficult to pronounce? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| phonology Groupie Peru Joined 3710 days ago 40 posts - 48 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 1 of 26 30 October 2015 at 8:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Does it influence the perspective of the native language?
I think that Arabic, Chinese, English for Spanish speakers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4860 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish | Message 2 of 26 30 October 2015 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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As far as I know, one's native language is a key factor, so difficulty is always relative. I think there are languages with more complex phonetic systems than others (as in "that one has 20 sounds, but that one only 10"), but this doesn't mean that a given language is "hard" to pronounce and another one "easy". In my experience, people whose native language consists of a few vowels and consonants find it difficult to hear the many different sounds in more complex languages (like Spanish vs English). But it seems to me that this happens also in the opposite direction, as people whose language have a lot of sounds cannot stop making these "extra sounds" and thus cannot produce the "simpler" sounds of the target language. Edited by caam_imt on 30 October 2015 at 10:00am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 3 of 26 31 October 2015 at 2:51am | IP Logged | ||
Someone who speaks 1 native language may be fluent in another but has trouble pronouncing certain words. Few examples: French rarely pronounce the letter "H". A sentence like "My house is big" would sound like "My ouse is big". Spanish & Italian speakers pronounce the ending "e" at the end of a word while English speakers do not. When an Italian speaker say something in English, a lot of times you'd hear the ending "e" sound. Chinese uses intonation to distinguish words while European languages use intonation to emphasize the tone of their voice depending on the use of the word. The English word "really" in a sentence such as "I really like this coat" would sound different from "Really?" used as a question. Chinese speakers often don't make the distinction. The word "yes" in English would sound like "ye-si" or "ye-su" depending on the Chinese dialect you speak as a native language. And the word "probably" (3 syllables) often sound like "pro-ba-bo-ly" (4 syllables) from a Cantonese-speaker because Cantonese doesn't have silent sounds. Edited by shk00design on 31 October 2015 at 2:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6270 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 4 of 26 11 November 2015 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Scottish Gaelic and Irish have many sounds that are difficult to pronounce properly, at
least for Anglophones. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 26 13 November 2015 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
As beginners they may also think you're saying a different word if the intonation is different from the one they're used to. I don't think English is one of the most difficult languages to pronounce, it's just that there's more exposure and more pressure to speak it anyhow (while travelling or dealing with foreigners). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jeff_fontaine Newbie Canada learnlanguageso Joined 3300 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 6 of 26 17 November 2015 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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The difficulty of the pronunciation of the sounds of a language for someone are directly related with the sounds that are present in this person's language. For example, the tones in Mandarin will be much easier to master by a native speaker of Thai and the [h] sound in American English will be much easier to master by speakers of Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese than by speakers of French since that [h] as shk00design pointed out, is not present in the French language.
So, the question: "What language is difficult to pronounce?", should be reformulated to be "What language is difficult to pronounce for people who only speak American English?" for example. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rozzie Senior Member United States Joined 3410 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 26 23 January 2016 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's Italian for me at least
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MarlonX19 Diglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4163 days ago 40 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French | Message 8 of 26 26 January 2016 at 4:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I have brazilian Portuguese as my native language and I've studied or at least taken a look at several languages and the one I found the hardest to pronounce was German, it gets really messed up in my mouth.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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