Are English words hard to pronounce? I’m asking because I’m wondering why I often come across non-English speakers (admittedly usually in fast-food restaurants) who, while I understand might not fully understand English, seem also unable to at least pronounce the words in a somewhat intelligible fashion. Usually it seems to be a matter of dropping consonants. Would someone please alleviate my ignorance and explain to me why some sounds used in English are in fact difficult for speakers of other languages to pronounce, and that I should therefore be more tolerant.
I don’t think it has anything to do with English in particular, but rather that all languages contain only a subset of all sounds, and therefore if you’re learning a second language, you are likely to have trouble pronouncing some of the sounds, regardless of what language it is.
For example, everybody has heard Japanese people getting their L’s and R’s mixed up. Neither sound (as we are familiar with them) exists in Japanese, and to confuse matters some more, they do have a sound which is sort of half-way between the two. So many Japanese people never know which sound to use where, because they find it difficult to hear the difference.
When I was learning Mandarin, it took me years to appreciate the difference between the sounds represented in pinyin as “q” and “ch”. Both are close to the hard “ch” sound in English, but not quite the same. But to a native Mandarin speaker, they sound totally different.
All of what friedo says is true, in addition to which English actually is fairly complicated compared at least to most other European languages. Much wider range of vowel sounds, in particular. Lots of diphthongs (a great many languages completely lack diphthongs). A lot of articulation farther back in the mouth than the different consonant sounds that they may need to distinguish among in their own language.
To generalize for the sake of a point: many of the Indo-European languages (of which English is one) are unusual among all languages in the numerous consonant clusters they feature. Consider words like script, costs, and explain. The strucures of these three words can be expressed as sequences of phonetic (not orthographic) consonants and vowels broken into syllabic units:
script = CCCVCC
costs = CVCCC
explain = VC-CCVC
Many more of the world’s languages possess simpler syllable structures. In many East Asian languages, syllables of simply CV or CVN (where “N” = nasal sounds /n/ and /ng/) are decidedly predominant. When one grows up speaking Japanese, Mandarin, or Cantonese, for example, your speech patterns tend to accomodate the syllable structures of those languages. Throwing extra consonants into a syllable is then difficult. The result is dropping of consonants.
If you were to learn Thai, you would likley struggle with three-way voicing contrast of their stop consonants. For example, in English, /t/ and /d/ are pronounced with the tongue in about the same position, but with the vocal cords commencing vibration at different times. For word-initial /t/, the cords don’t get going until well after the /t/ is released and the subsequent vowel or semivowel (/r/, /w/) is being pronounced. For /d/, the vocal cords are vibrating from the time the tongue closure is made with the ridge of the mouth, and kee right on vibrating for the subsequent vowel or semivowel.
As English speakers, we’re used to this two-tiered voicing system for consonants. It’s pretty much the only system in European languages, though many European languages kick in voicing a tad earlier than English for their “unvoiced” sounds like /t/.
But in Thai, there is a three-way contrast in voicing. Our English word-initial /t/ is present, though it’s transliterated /th/ for Thai. Thai also has an equivalent for English /d/. Then there’s a third sound midway between the two, transliterated as /t/, in which the vocal cords commence vibration just barely in advance of the consonant’s release. This third consonant sounds to English-speaker ears pretty much the same as /d/, but it is crucially different for Thai speakers.
Many languages have “eccentricities” like this that make native pronunciation difficult for those who grew up speaking alternatively-structured languages and assimilating completely different speech patterns. This is a human limitation, not a willful display of nonchalance or laziness on the part of an individual.
Here’s another example: In Russian and Ukrainian, there is no “th” sound. Probably other languages lack it, too. Thus, “weather” becomes “wezzer,” “wedder,” or “wetter.” “Threw” becomes “trew.” However, there is a consonant sound “shch,” as in the middle of “fresh cheese,” that does not exist in English. It has its own letter in the Cyrillic alphabet and is spelled “sh” or “sch” in the Roman alphabet. So we probably misspell and mispronounce names like “Schevchenko” all the time.
Shouldn’t that be VC-CCCVC? “x” is written as one letter, but is actually two sounds run together.
You’re correct – this is a point I had intended to make, but flubbed it instead. Thanks for the catch.
The Master has spoken about the difficulty of pronouncing a certain Middle Eastern dictator’s name in English.
Thanks. That best answers the question I think I was trying to ask. I knew why people who didn’t speak English fluently might mispronounce certain consonants, but I didn’t know why they sometimes failed to pronounce them at all.
Which languages are considered hardest for a non-native speaker to enunciate properly? And is there a language that’s considered the easiest, because it contains the fewest unique sounds?
Isn’t “x” three sounds? /Eks/?
I don’t know of many languages that have the two sounds represented by “th”.
Maybe someone here can solve this little mystery, which I think is on topic…
I was once discussing Russian/Slavic accents with a Ukrainian friend of mine, and we were talking about Russians substituting W sounds for the letter V, as they sometimes do when speaking English. (You know, “nuclear wessels” and the like.) So I asked her if this happened because Russian didn’t have a V sound, and speakers are approximating as best they can. But she said no, Russian does have a V sound, same as English.
So why the hell, I asked her, would you say “wessel” if you can say “vessel” just fine? She had no satisfactory answer for me. Either that, or I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
It was soon after that that she stopped returning my phone calls. But that’s definitely a sidetrack for this thread.
Can anyone who knows some Russian explain what’s going on?
Well, that’s a lot of generalization you’re asking for. But the most basic syllable shape is CV - consonant, vowel. Languages with largely CV syllables will be least likely to pose problems like the trouble with pronouncing English consonant structures. Japanese comes to mind, as does Hawai’ian. Hawai’ian has something like twelve unique sounds, and most of them are fairly common in other languages. Whether the sounds are common or not is a big deal - Mandarin, for instance, has several affricates and fricatives at the start of syllables that are not all that common (thus the trouble mentioned above with “ch” and “q”.)
English certainly has quite permissive syllable structures - we’ll permit all sorts of wacky consonant combinations that most languages don’t. The Slavic languages tend to be pretty bad, and the Caucasian languages (including Georgian) are godawful. But I don’t know that you can really make a fair guess and choose one language as hard - most sounds that don’t exist in your native language will be hard to acquire. But exactly which ones are hardest in a foreign language depends on your own native language, so I don’t think it’s safe to guess which languages are easiest or hardest in general.
If you’re saying the letter x, then yes. The consontal sound it produces, though, is /ks/. So “explain” could also be written “eksplain”.
They’re not as bad as commonly thought, though. Proto-Slavic had a very simple syllable structure, with very few consonant clusters, and most modern Slavic clusters are the result of short vowels disappearing. When you see seemingly impossible clusters, such as “Plsen” or “Hrvatski”, remember that the “l” or “r” are acting like vowels, and such words aren’t much more difficult to pronounce than English “bird” or “bull”.
Well, I would stop calling you too, if you kept calling me and asking me why I said “wessel.”
Another example: the Welsh “ll” and probably other gaelic sounds (about which I know nothing).
Yeah, Czech and Serbo-Croatian aren’t so bad for Slavic languages.
But when you get to Russian, you get goodies like встречать /vstrechat’/ (to meet someone, encounter someone) and ткнуть /tknut’/ (to thrust, poke, stick something into).
Certainly. But syllabic /r/ and /l/ aren’t all that common among languages, right? And you have there /tsk/ which isn’t a real common combination either.
There ain’t no justification for Georgian, though. 
From an interesting Wikipedia page called Non-native pronunciations of English:
I think when you’re friend said that Russian has a “v, same as English”, she was very technically mistaken in the strictest pedantic sense. Broadly, she was correct – the “v” sound is present. However, Russian “v” and English “v” have some subtle differences.
Russian “v” is commonly pronounced weakly compared to English “v”. ISTM that many Russian speakers lapse from a voiced labiodental fricative (i.e. /v/) into a labiodental approximant in casual speech. The approximant would sound pretty much like “w” to English ears. It’s analogous to most English speakers lapsing from a voiceless /t/ to a voiced consonant (/d/ or even an alveolar tap akin to Spanish /r/) in words like letter and butter.
Georgians cheat – they throw in epithentic vowels quite freely, I understand.