How well do you cope then with e.g. Germanic and Eastern European features (such as vowels ä, ö, ü/y, y/ы and schwa, difficult consonant clusters, and short/long vowels and consonants independent of stress)?
You don't have to go that far afield. Most Brazilians have a tremendous challenge in saying "the" and will be taught to say "th" as "d" and often it's good enough to be understood, but far from natural sounding.
Totally forgot the most obvious ones! I think "the" and "thing" are difficult to some degree for most non-English speakers. Actually, languages that have those both or something very close naturally are very rare. Only Icelandic comes to mind. And then peninsular Spanish, Galician, Albanian, Greek and many Arabic dialects have the "thing" at least.
Of all the approximates people use for "the", the soft Latin "d" is quite close to the original, compared to, say, the Franco-German "ze"! Even here in Finland, we are quite fluent in English as such but many completely disregard the difference brought by the "h" in both phonemes, and just aspirate the "t" like you would do without the "h" (and then pronounce the other t's softly without aspiration at all!).
It's all comprehensible as long as its regular, I guess. Still, as an elementary Spanish speaker, I still often get distracted by the Brazilian r's, since instead of "r", I hear the Spanish "jota" or otherwise something I would describe as in the range of h-like sounds, not r's.
simtel20|4 years ago
yeahforsureman|4 years ago
Of all the approximates people use for "the", the soft Latin "d" is quite close to the original, compared to, say, the Franco-German "ze"! Even here in Finland, we are quite fluent in English as such but many completely disregard the difference brought by the "h" in both phonemes, and just aspirate the "t" like you would do without the "h" (and then pronounce the other t's softly without aspiration at all!).
It's all comprehensible as long as its regular, I guess. Still, as an elementary Spanish speaker, I still often get distracted by the Brazilian r's, since instead of "r", I hear the Spanish "jota" or otherwise something I would describe as in the range of h-like sounds, not r's.