[kevinstubbs]

Any grammar is surmountable, but the languages that are truly hard are ones which have sounds or consonant clusters that your native language(s) don't. For example, learning Georgian as a native English/Italian speaker.. I could hardly even say basic words like "forest" (t'ke), "water" (tsqali), or "frog" (baqaqi) for the first few months. Look up the ყ letter, or listen and judge for yourself ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (the frog cries in the water) Hear natives speak it: https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%...

The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated, while the others are what you would more likely hear casually/in conversation.

[Tomte]

Even listening is hard.

I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e. learning where exactly the tongue needs to be.

Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as much as I want, but I will probably never be able to distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike").

[kevinstubbs]

I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I never mastered ш (which I guess is retroflex fricative?) vs щ and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft sounds in Russian because this

>and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike"

Is too true. With practice and listening, my pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick, like you did with Swedish?

[dheera]

> I could hardly even say

If I may take the liberty to nitpick, that's a thing only an adult would say. A 5-year-old would just try.

[bsder]

> A 5-year-old would just try.

And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing it up.

One of the issues with learning anything as an adult is that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign language learning turns that up to 11.

Personally, I think this is the primary issue with adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to put in long hours of work because you aren't going to get any external motivation for a very long time.

[kevinstubbs]

That's a pretty unforgiving interpretation of what I wrote. Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say.