[rootbear]

My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant. Finnish uses doubled letters for this, Hungarian uses accents (a vs á, o vs ó, etc.) for vowels and doubled letters for consonants. I've gotten to where I can hear the difference when listening to George speak Hungarian but it took some effort.

[usrnm]

> One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant

I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure it exists in English as well.

[friendly_chap]

Absolutely, think "lick" vs "leak". I think the author means Hungarian maybe uses very similar looking letters to denote this (ie "lik" and "lík").

In Hungarian also every vowel comes in pairs of short-long: a-á (what vs high), e-é (ever vs eight), "o-ó" (moss vs most), "u-ú" (put vs you), "ö-ő" (fur vs ... well long version has no English equivalent I think but German does: schön).

[borroka]

This is an important sign when someone who is not Italian speaks Italian. The double consonant, for example in the word bello/a, indicates a longer “l” sound, but English speakers in particular do not hear the longer sound and therefore pronounce it as belo/a. Or, when they are told about the longer sound, they pronounce it in a caricatured way as bellllo/a.

[volemo]

Sure does! “Beach” and “bitch” differ only in vowel length in some accents, IME.

[rootbear]

Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.

[messe]

Only some dialects of English have contrastive vowel length.

[yencabulator]

I've yet to hear a non-Finn get doubled consonants right, ever. Kukkakaali. Ikkuna.

Somewhat easier but still challenging is getting the wovels in the right place. They're just different, and the barrier is as hard going the other way but Finns have more practice in speaking English than the other way around. It's similar to the idea that it's very very hard to learn a tonal language if you grew with non-tonal languages.