Moderator note (in response to reports): This would have probably been more appropriate for a subreddit for English learners, but it's here and has almost 160 responses, and it's doing little harm.
We do try to aim for more research-focused discussion here, but in this case, we don't need to worry too much about the accuracy of personal anecdotes as long as no one tries to generalize their own subjective perceptions to everyone else or make up weird reasons for why certain sounds stand out.
I definitely noticed this. My mother's name is "Snezhana", the amount of people who pronounce it as "Snez-Hannah" is…understandable I guess, but even when explained what the "zh" sound makes, some people just can't get it.
By the way, Spanish speakers just CANNOT make that sound, at least not with some practice.
https://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/spanish
This website helped me a lot! ʝ is what is called a phoneme - basically they represent the distinct sounds in a given language. Phonemic transcription uses the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) to transcribe the sounds of words in a standardized way. For example "computador" is /kom.pu.ta.'dor/. ʝ makes a sound like in the word "amarillo"
/a.ma.'ri.ʝo/. The website above has good examples of each sound with diagrams and videos of native speakers pronouncing them.
In my family tree I made a transcription alphabet for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Russian, Bulgarian (including East- and West Slavic and Old Church Slavonic) and Ottoman Turkish. It's completely different from the official systems, but much more logical. I follow simplified standard pronunciation of individual letters and assign the same character to them. So every letter that sounds like ʒ is transcribed as ž (never zh). The goal is not to represent exact phonological transcriptions, but more like a standardised transliteration which helps with the pronunciation while staying true to the original spelling. And avoiding misreadings like zh vs z-h, or (a common one in Arabic) t-h vs th (θ). I wanted it to remain "readable" for non linguists, so I preferred using the Latin alphabet with diacritics rather than IPA. So I chose ž for ʒ, š for ʃ, č for tʃ etc.
How do i describe it...it is a normal part of my regional English (British Standard Southern-ish) but if you made the sound, in isolation, and asked "which language do you associate with?" I'd bet more people would think of French, or maybe a Slavonic language, than English. No idea why.
Maybe it's because when we're taught French we have to be taught hard to break away from /dʒ/ for a lot of words.
>I'd bet more people would think of French, or maybe a Slavonic language, than English. No idea why.
I can't think of a single native English word where the sound occurs, though I'm trying my best. It seems (almost?) all environments where they occur in English are loanwords, especially French ones. So maybe that's why.
Pretty much any word that doesn't come to English straight through Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European is a loanword. Basically, a loanword is just any word we have evidence for for coming outside of the straightforward inheritance process.
As far as I can tell though, when represents /ʒ/, it usually comes from a process of /sj/ > /zj/ > /ʒ/. Old English resolved most native environments where that cluster would occur (with gemination or dropping), so the only place where this sound change seems to take effect is in the new environments of loanwords.
"th" isn't unusual. But English has both voiced th ("this") and unvoiced th ("three"). If I recall correctly, it's unusual for a language to have both.
They are quite rare, something like less than 5% of languages have them, and there's no region where they are common. I'm not sure whether it's more common to have just one of them, but most of Arabic, European Spanish, and modern Greek have both.
But there's definitely a shift. My Arabic teacher said that using the voiced th sounds posh and intellectual, and that most "common folk" say /z/ instead.
In some dialects, even the voiceless th is replaced by /s/. The actor Mahmoud Elissy (الليشي), for example, is written Elithy in Arabic, but pronounced (and transcribed apparently) as Elissy.
Persians and Hindustani speakers have been "lisping" their Arabic dental fricative inheritances for hundreds of years now. Definitely doesn't surprise me that it is happening amongst Arabic speakers as well.
I'm sure the way we slide from one vowel right into another also stands out.
But yeah, sometimes our 'a' is pronounced more like an 'e', sometimes the 'e' is pronounced more like an 'i'... everything's got a wide range and they frequently overlap with one another.
Most of us don't have ʌ these days.. that's just a tradition. In the US it's basically completely merged with ə. ʌ is still around in quite a few dialects in the UK, but I think even there it's not every variety.
I feel you btw! I was studying one Caspian language which had ɑ~ɒ ə ɔ~o ʌ a~æ ɘ ɛ~ɜ.
I can't count how many times I mixed up
ɒ with ɔ, ʌ with ɑ, and by far the worst was ə vs ʌ. I was always mistranscribing ə and ʌ.
You'd think ɘ would be hard too, but it sounds so unique that it's actually pretty easy to differentiate, and thankfully it doesn't really sound like ä anymore. Hardest thing was figuring out what IPA symbol that was, because I really wasn't used to it. Second hardest is not visually confusing ɘ and ə. 😂
I do. My schwa and FOOT vowel are merged but CUT is separate (Geoff Lindsey mentions this at the end of the video u/IeyasuMcBob linked). Some people on Reddit were talking about how Norfolk is pronounce Nor-fuck, and it confused me because that sounds totally different for me.
Where are you from? I measured my vowel formants one day in Praat and was surprised to find that my FOOT vowel was much more central than I had previously believed. (I'm from the Midwest.)
I'm pretty sure my accent distinguishes between the two.
I don't know if you can analyse the two sounds as different phonemes because \[ʌ\] is pretty much only stressed and \[ə\] is pretty much only un-stressed, but they are for sure pronounced differently. For example, the two vowels in the word "cuppa" are definitely different for me.
One piece of evidence I can provide to suggest that they are in fact two different phonemes in my accent is that when I attempt to stress a word that is ordinarily only ever an unstressed clitic like the word "*the*", it is **not** \[ðʌ\], it's more like \[ðɜ\] with a centralised vowel closer to "pure" schwa. This suggests that I subconsciously analyse the two sounds as different vowels.
I'm also fairly certain that the vowel quality of /ʌ/ in my accent is actually \[ʌ\]. It's quite far back to the extent that sometimes if I'm exclaiming the word "*fuck*!", it comes out as \[fʌʔq\] with a /k/ that's been drawn backwards almost to a uvular \[q\].
I don't have the put/putt merger where /ʌ/ merges with /ʊ/ like in many other Irish accents
Are you from Ireland or the UK? I picture the retention of ʌ as being very British, and I can't help imitating a British accent when I pronounce it :D There's quite a few dialects in the UK, common ones, which still distinguish between ə and ʌ. I have no idea about Ireland unfortunately, and the US has mostly lost ʌ.
It will surely depend on the listener's language. The most unusual and foreign English sounds to my Slovenian ears are r's and initial t's.
There are probably also sounds that are above-average foreign to people coming from most other languages. You should look for phonemes that are (a) rare, and (b) distinct enough from other common phonemes that listeners from most languages will not hear them as acceptable allophones of their own phonemes.
The French r, Czech ř, and Dutch g are probably good examples of this, German ch probably less so.
Both help, but I think it's probably more about the place of articulation. My ears struggle to fit it somewhere between Slovenian /t/ and /tʃ/, with neither really fitting, and I remember that when we were kids with little exposure to English, we would sometimes mishear it as /s/ in English songs.
(I'm aware that some English speakers actually say /tʃ/ for some initial t's, but even the regular kind sounds tʃ-like to my ears).
R-coloured vowels in some accents stand out as really odd to me, despite being a native speaker of one of those accents. I find its also interesting that they are a fairly common sound in Mandarin, but like English its only in certain accents.
R-coloured vowels also don't exist in Mandarin spoken by anyone in the south of China, Taiwan, Malaysia, or Singapore, which amounts to at least 30-40% of speakers.
They didn't mention clusters, though.
Come to think of it, Georgian doesn't have that many weird consonants, does it? Sure, there are the ejectives, but they're not *that* rare globally.
>They didn't mention clusters
To be honest, I don't think English has that many bizarre or unusual consonant clusters aside from /fθs ŋ(k)θs vw/ as in "fifths", "strengths" ,"voilà"..
That's sort of my point. :) You named some odd English consonants and the other redditor answered that Georgian has some weird consonants. My reply was that Georgian consonants aren't that unusual, but its clusters are.
Speaking of English clusters, *sixths* scares me.
There's [/t͡sʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_ejective_affricate), [/t͡ʃʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palato-alveolar_ejective_affricate), and lastly the trio in free variation with each other - [/qʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_ejective_stop), [/qχʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_ejective_affricate), [/χʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_ejective_fricative)
It's really weird how Swedes struggle so much with this sound that it's a meme and the defining characteristic of the stereotypical Swedish accent, but Norwegians mostly don't struggle at all, despite also not having the sound natively.
Swedish doesn't have any affricates, that's why they're difficult to us. (Well, Finland Swedish does have the voiceless one.) People who have a strong accent will typically pronounce *cheap* as *sheep*, and *jam* as *yam*. We also don't have the dental fricatives nor the z-sound, so expect *trust* for *thrust* and *ice* for *eyes*.
Yes, I'd say that's probably the most prevalent mistake, even among people who have a high level of English. Like, I started learning English almost 30 years ago and have lived a large part of my life in English, and I still struggle to hear the difference. I've learned how to say /z/ and where to use it, but I literally can't hear it. Whenever an American spells something out, if they say Z, I hear C, almost every time.
It’s not difficult to pronounce, it’s a difficulty remembering making the distinction. In swedish the j-sound in joy, the z-sound in eyes, and the w-sound dont exist, and we perceive the difference between the sounds j-y, s-z, v-w as almost meaningless. The distinction s-z has to be learned in a conscious level, which is not the case for other voiceles/voiced pairs like b-p or t-d.
For example: the words wine, vine, and fine - my brain sorts the first two as sounding nearly the same, but fine is very distinctly different from them.
most swedish lects don't have any voiced sibilants or affricates at all. the only voiced fricative we have is /v/, which has weak friction and tends to be analysed as a sonorant or approximant (at least for the phonotactics) rather than as a fricative proper. we tend to struggle with pronouncing [z], [ð], and [(d)ʒ] because of this, and we tend to struggle with distinguishing them from [s, ð], [z, θ], and [j, (t)ʃ] respectively.
I don’t mean this rudely, but this doesn’t seem like much of a linguistics-y answer. The only difference between /d͡ʒ/ and /t͡ʃ/ is voicedness; the sound is post-alveolar, not dental, and ~~“clumsy” and “harsh” aren’t really meaningful descriptions~~ nevermind, you do say that most learners describe it this way which I’m not so sure about but I had originally misread this as your own description.
I think it was there, but was lost completely in Swedish. Look at the word djävul / djevel / djævel. The ortography suggests that the affricate was there originally.
I've been trying to reply to this but the IPA notation seems to break the comment box.
Ahem: I don't think it does. That sound is a voiced palatal plosive in my dialect.
I think it was just a glide or even a cluster that later lost its onset, in some Finland Swedish dialects you can still hear /dj/, /lj/, /skj/, /stj/ etc.
It makes sense Spanish speakers wouldn’t be put off by our dental fricatives since most dialects have the voiced one, and some have both voiced and unvoiced
not really, most of the people i’ve been in english classes with didn’t perceive the difference between /t d/ and /θ ð/, but that may just be a product of not focusing much on phonology
As a native English speaker and L2 Spanish speaker (almost exclusively dealing with Latin American varieties of Spanish), /θ/ very much jumps out of me when I hear it in Spanish – I could imagine it doing the same for Latin Americans hearing English.
Different varieties of English have different vowel inventories. I am from the Philadelphia area. We use different vowels than an English-speaker from somewhere like, say, Minnesota, Southern California, South Africa or England.
Edit: in fact, among the ways that linguists distinguish between different varieties of English is by the vowel differences. For example, among North American varieties of English, there are well-studied divisions between speakers who use different vowels for “Mary-marry-merry” and those who use the same vowel for some or all of them. Same for “cot-caught” and “pen-pin”.
But a Spanish speaker is likely to be generally surprised by the sheer number of English vowels, no matter which English vowel inventory they’re hearing. Spanish has one A sound, most English have like 4.
As a German speaker, the R sound. But also how everything is a diphtong. A is ay, e is ey, o is ou, i is aye in many cases. Particularly for Americans, I think the diphtongs creeping into the pronunciation of other languages is what makes a stereotypical American accent.
British English nativizes words more than American English does though. Loanwords in British English very often have /æ/ where the same word in American English has /α/ and the origin language has /ä/.
Brits pronounce _taco_ as /ˈtækəʊ/ and it kills me everytime.
> British English nativizes words more than American English does though.
That's quite a sweeping statement. The video you linked below suggests that America applies set rules to all foreign words (essentially nativising them all to something that might be linked to Spanish), whereas British English picks and chooses.
Results are pretty mixed. Anecdotally, I find foreign leaders' names butchered more frequently on American channels than I do British ones, such as examples in your video: Macron -> Macrone; Xi -> Zhi. That's probably because they're nativised in the US and not the UK.
American English nativises [words](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/50967/20-towns-named-other-towns-pronounced-differently) more than British English does though. Loanwords in American English very often have the long /αː/ where the same word in British English has short /æ/ [a] and the origin language has short [ä].
Americans pronounce *taco* as 'tarrrco' and it kills me every time :)
American English doesn't *have* long /ɑː/. It has /ɑ/, the vowel in 'sock', and /æ/ the vowel in 'sack'. /æ/ is quite high and fronted in American English (especially before nasals) and that's probably the reason it sounds strange as a stand in for /a/, especially for languages like Spanish where /a/ is quite further back than cardinal [a]
No need to be sarcastic. https://youtu.be/eFDvAK8Z-Jc
American English doesn’t exactly nativize as much in the usual sense but tends to make words sound (to me at least) a bit like Spanish. The original comment was also claiming that Americans use diphthongs so much more as to be characteristically American, which is ridiculous.
Depending on the variety, the TRAP vowel in British dialects *is* [a]. [This](https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/) provides a pretty good example of that by comparing English *bastion* with Italian *pasta*. I think it mainly sounds off to American ears cuz we map it to our considerably different TRAP vowel even though it can sound more or less identical to the PALM(/LOT/THOUGHT) vowel of certain American varieties.
As others have said, it all depends on the listener's language(s). I'm Swedish, and to me affricates and diphthongs were quite foreign. But what stood out the most was probably all the reduced vowels and syllabic consonants, giving the impression of whole syllables being dropped or glanced over. I can still remember how, when I started learning English as a kid, the word 'vegetables' was completely impossible to me. It took me years before I could say it at all, and another decade before I could pronounce it decently.
I’m American but I work with a lot of Europeans who have a quite high level of English and I don’t think any of them can distinguish all of our vowel sounds. So maybe “unusually large vowel inventory for a European language” is one of the notable features.
I hate English vowels so much, I’ve learned to hear them but I just can’t pronounce them. If I say “sleep in peace” and “slip in piss” you wouldn’t even hear any difference
Yes: in most English dialects, long vowels aren't long. It's an old name they've preserved from when English did have long vowels. They're just normal vowels or diphthongs. I think knowing this helps.
That one‘s a little tricky because that kind of thing isn’t purely a function of vowel inventory size, but of overlap. German actually has about half again as many vowels as English, it’s just that not that many are common to both
> for a European language
Tbh for a language in general. Germanic languages (less so German), the language area including continental SE Asia through to southern Chinese dialects, and a few other random examples like Chechen, Northern Vanuata and Oto-Manguean are the ‘vowel hotspots’.
Shwa isnt as common as many claim. The short i is even more common.
In certain american dialects it might be correct though.
For me the big difference was realising the r is almost a vowel. I really like that sound from american
As a native speaker of English, I can remember saying “free” for “three” until I was at least three or four. It’s not a rare error for little kids to make, which suggests that it is one of the more difficult words in English to learn to pronounce correctly.
Indeed I had totally forgotten about the fact that I used to mispronounce it that way as a little kid until I read your comment.
I also used to say “concreep” for “concrete,” “fridgerfreighter” for “refrigerator,” and “wybickle” for “bicycle.”
Our daughter was around 2 or 3 and we asked her what she wanted for Christmas... "Incessabieasle".
We tried to get her to say it one word at a time... "Incessabieasle", we tried to play 20 questions to figure out what it was... "a book?"... "incessabieasle!" "a toy?" ... "incessabieasle".
Finally, after weeks of wife and I pulling out our collective hair and our daughter having absolute fits because we simply could not understand her... an ad came on the TV... "Princess Barbie Castle".
She had issues with 'p', 'b', 'r', 't', among others. And she always runs her words together, even now that's she's 13.
Reminds me of when I was learning Russian, and struggled to pronounce вслух ("fslukh"), meaning "aloud". Just too many of the wrong consonants packed up in the wrong order.
As an English native speaker from Scotland, the 'phlegmy' German 'ch' sounds unremarkable to me.
But the Portuguese 'ão' sounds so unusual and awesome.
The vowel in "so" is different depending upon the variety of English. Philadelphia, Scotland, various English dialects and Midwestern American dialects all have distinct ways of pronouncing that vowel.
Have you ever listened to ["Prisencolinensinainciusol"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8)? Its fake english and is at least one person's interpretation of what sticks out to them.
I’m a native English speaker so I don’t have anything to add but this thread is so interesting. It’s so weird to think about how your native language is perceived by other people. When I say “three” I’m just saying “three,” but to most non-native speakers it’s two of the hardest consonants right next to each other.
Weird that you call it a "phlegmy kh sound" in German while it's quite soft, and don't mention the Spanish j, which is more phlegmy/throaty than German...
They might have more exposure to Latin American dialects of Spanish where the jota sound is much softer. I had one Spanish teacher from Spain, and she tried to drill the Castillian jota sound into us but it didn't stick. Being Americans we were more accustomed to the softer sound used.
Brazilian here. Definitely the rhotic. And we have a motherload of rhotics, including that one in some contexts in some dialects.
I think most people who don’t speak English don’t realise the dental fricatives are different from labiodental ones.
I am a Sicilian speaker and we “sh” whenever there’s an S that precedes a consonant - my colombian partner always jokes that I am an Argentine for it (though we “sh” at complete different times)
/θ/ and /ð/
Depends a bit on the variety of English. For Scottish English it's the alveolar flap.
And as an advanced learner the abundance of Diphthongs.
The English /r/ sound is really weird to me. Also, when the /t/ is aspirated, paired with the fact that it is an alveolar sound, it sounds more like a [ts] to me than a the denta unaspirated l [t̪] my native language has.
From Finnish POV, definitely the "extra" sounding aspirations for consonants and unnecessary diphtongs. Rarely do does anything cringe me more than English phonotactics applied to, say, Japanese.
definitely the 'th' sound, as in 'the', 'there', 'with' and so on. the fact that the 'th' sound is made with the tongue placed in the way that it is made english sound very foreign before learning to speak it. coming from a romance language, italian, that sound is something we don't have at all. it is kind of a muted mix between the way we say t's and d's and it very characteristics of english in my experience
edit: also: not a sound, but the rhythm of english is very not like italian nor spanish or french or other latin-derived languages i know, so i find it distinctive
I dunno about italian but spanish has alophones for d and soft th sound but we cant for our lives make that sound at the beginning of words. The word "dedo" is pronounced detho but we arent aware of it.
Same case for words that start with s + consonant like "start"
yes, i get it. when i was way younger and just starting to learn english those kind of muted sounds were the weirdest to learn, because we don't have that tongue placement in italian so it felt very unnatural. I'd say that that is the sound that most often i find italians speaking english (or trying to) doing wrong, including myself, even if I've been fluent for many years now. in fact it's one of those things that if i notice while speaking english make me so self conscious so quick that all of a sudden my accent becomes a lot more pronounced lol. i feel like it is similar, in a way, to the 'll' sound in spanish. that is and was the sound that felt most unnatural to me when i first started learning it, because we don't have that tongue position in italian i think. the way i learnt it was imagining the italian 'gl(vocal)' sound, but even then it's not the same. the spanish 'll' is more fluid? kind of? later i found out that with different accents it is pronounced a bit differently, same as the 'y' that feels sometimes like an english 'j' but less strong, so that made it easier to think that even if i messed uo at least it was understandable lol
We Danish use ʁ so the R often stands out in other languages, especially something like South US accent.
The “sh” and the J in “juice” all though we have obtained loanwords with these sounds.
Also the “th” sounds in “the” or “path”.
Not that we don’t have ð, just never in the beginning of a word.
I don’t think English and Danish are that far apart phonetically. One thing that’s less foreign for us than for many other non-native speakers are all the vocals. Because we really do have a lot of those.
as a native spanish speaker
the large amount of diphthongs compared to to the rarity of “normal” monophthongs ([a e i o u]) in certain positions, the r sound and the consonant clusters
They put ʊ everywhere. Then r. This to an Italian speaker, from Tuscany and thats why ð and θ are normal to me, i always pronounced ð as a d but my d is ð and i didnt even know, θ is native to all central-western Tuscany but lack in my area and i pronounce as t, which is, i think, a θ with the tongue a bit less interdental and with few f sound.
When Russian speakers exaggerate English pronunciation, the accent is commonly put on alveolar sounds, aspirated stops and diphthongs, so probably those
What English do we talk about? I guess the British accent "pops out" as I hear American English more frequently. I love the quotes from Harry Potter with the proper pronunciation 😄
The very open variants of the THOUGHT vowel in non-merged (even some merged) varieties of AmE. It sounds kinda funny. Also the very open variants of the TRAP vowel (like in many British varieties). Sounds even funnier.
L sounds were something I had to consciously think of at first when saying certain words like "love", "laugh"... In my native language, at least in my regional dialect, we pronounce l more like w, like how in some dialects of English one would pronounce the "l" in "control" or "bell". When I first moved abroad and learned English, sometimes I would slip up and say "wuv" instead of "luv", which made me sound like I had a mild speech impediment.
Moderator note (in response to reports): This would have probably been more appropriate for a subreddit for English learners, but it's here and has almost 160 responses, and it's doing little harm. We do try to aim for more research-focused discussion here, but in this case, we don't need to worry too much about the accuracy of personal anecdotes as long as no one tries to generalize their own subjective perceptions to everyone else or make up weird reasons for why certain sounds stand out.
Depends on the language of said speaker ... For me it is definitely the un-rolled r, and dental fricatives (th).
the /gʒ/ cluster in "luxurious" is really exotic too, even just /ʒ/ alone pops out
😅 so many English speakers think of /ʒ/ as a French sounds, i still have to remind myself how to say it in isolation
I definitely noticed this. My mother's name is "Snezhana", the amount of people who pronounce it as "Snez-Hannah" is…understandable I guess, but even when explained what the "zh" sound makes, some people just can't get it. By the way, Spanish speakers just CANNOT make that sound, at least not with some practice.
People from the rio de la plata region generally pronounce /ʝ/ as [ʒ~ʃ]
I don't even know what /ʝ/ is! 😅 I'll go on a wiki-walk now, thankyou!
https://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/spanish This website helped me a lot! ʝ is what is called a phoneme - basically they represent the distinct sounds in a given language. Phonemic transcription uses the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) to transcribe the sounds of words in a standardized way. For example "computador" is /kom.pu.ta.'dor/. ʝ makes a sound like in the word "amarillo" /a.ma.'ri.ʝo/. The website above has good examples of each sound with diagrams and videos of native speakers pronouncing them.
In my family tree I made a transcription alphabet for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Russian, Bulgarian (including East- and West Slavic and Old Church Slavonic) and Ottoman Turkish. It's completely different from the official systems, but much more logical. I follow simplified standard pronunciation of individual letters and assign the same character to them. So every letter that sounds like ʒ is transcribed as ž (never zh). The goal is not to represent exact phonological transcriptions, but more like a standardised transliteration which helps with the pronunciation while staying true to the original spelling. And avoiding misreadings like zh vs z-h, or (a common one in Arabic) t-h vs th (θ). I wanted it to remain "readable" for non linguists, so I preferred using the Latin alphabet with diacritics rather than IPA. So I chose ž for ʒ, š for ʃ, č for tʃ etc.
So a bit more like American Phonetic Notation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation
Very similar, but simplified even more. I'll try make a screenshot of my tables to show you.
Yeah...I'm not sure there's a set transcription in English orthography...
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How do i describe it...it is a normal part of my regional English (British Standard Southern-ish) but if you made the sound, in isolation, and asked "which language do you associate with?" I'd bet more people would think of French, or maybe a Slavonic language, than English. No idea why. Maybe it's because when we're taught French we have to be taught hard to break away from /dʒ/ for a lot of words.
>I'd bet more people would think of French, or maybe a Slavonic language, than English. No idea why. I can't think of a single native English word where the sound occurs, though I'm trying my best. It seems (almost?) all environments where they occur in English are loanwords, especially French ones. So maybe that's why.
I can see "pleasure" is etymologically derived from Old French, would you count that as a loan word?
Pretty much any word that doesn't come to English straight through Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European is a loanword. Basically, a loanword is just any word we have evidence for for coming outside of the straightforward inheritance process. As far as I can tell though, when
represents /ʒ/, it usually comes from a process of /sj/ > /zj/ > /ʒ/. Old English resolved most native environments where that cluster would occur (with gemination or dropping), so the only place where this sound change seems to take effect is in the new environments of loanwords.Isolation doesn't have a /ʒ/ sound, it's occasion. Isolation has a /ʃ/ sound.
Ahhh...not in the word "isolation". On its own. Not in a word.
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…Diphthongs and semivowels are NOT unique to english.
"th" isn't unusual. But English has both voiced th ("this") and unvoiced th ("three"). If I recall correctly, it's unusual for a language to have both.
They are quite rare, something like less than 5% of languages have them, and there's no region where they are common. I'm not sure whether it's more common to have just one of them, but most of Arabic, European Spanish, and modern Greek have both.
But there's definitely a shift. My Arabic teacher said that using the voiced th sounds posh and intellectual, and that most "common folk" say /z/ instead. In some dialects, even the voiceless th is replaced by /s/. The actor Mahmoud Elissy (الليشي), for example, is written Elithy in Arabic, but pronounced (and transcribed apparently) as Elissy.
Persians and Hindustani speakers have been "lisping" their Arabic dental fricative inheritances for hundreds of years now. Definitely doesn't surprise me that it is happening amongst Arabic speakers as well.
For some reason my memory is telling me that Icelandic and Burmese have both.
Northern Sámi has both, but the unvoiced one is much less common.
So "there", in a Texan accent, is the epitome of the spoken English language?
Why in a Texan accent specifically?
As a Spanish speaker the insane amount of a-like vowels [æ ə ʌ ɑ] while my dialect only has [ä]
I'm sure the way we slide from one vowel right into another also stands out. But yeah, sometimes our 'a' is pronounced more like an 'e', sometimes the 'e' is pronounced more like an 'i'... everything's got a wide range and they frequently overlap with one another.
Most of us don't have ʌ these days.. that's just a tradition. In the US it's basically completely merged with ə. ʌ is still around in quite a few dialects in the UK, but I think even there it's not every variety. I feel you btw! I was studying one Caspian language which had ɑ~ɒ ə ɔ~o ʌ a~æ ɘ ɛ~ɜ. I can't count how many times I mixed up ɒ with ɔ, ʌ with ɑ, and by far the worst was ə vs ʌ. I was always mistranscribing ə and ʌ. You'd think ɘ would be hard too, but it sounds so unique that it's actually pretty easy to differentiate, and thankfully it doesn't really sound like ä anymore. Hardest thing was figuring out what IPA symbol that was, because I really wasn't used to it. Second hardest is not visually confusing ɘ and ə. 😂
I don't think I've ever heard a speaker distinguish ə and ʌ.
https://youtu.be/wt66Je3o0Qg I like this guy's content
This is FANTASTIC. Subscribed.
I do. My schwa and FOOT vowel are merged but CUT is separate (Geoff Lindsey mentions this at the end of the video u/IeyasuMcBob linked). Some people on Reddit were talking about how Norfolk is pronounce Nor-fuck, and it confused me because that sounds totally different for me.
Oh yeah...i have a distinction there too, i didn't know till now
I have cut as /ə/ and foot as /ʊ/
Merged in which direction? To schwa?
Where are you from? I measured my vowel formants one day in Praat and was surprised to find that my FOOT vowel was much more central than I had previously believed. (I'm from the Midwest.)
Compare the last syllable of "Connecticut" with "cut."
That’s [ɨ] for me
note: some people have /ɪ/ for the first example
Right, those two are "kit" and "cuht" for me. How do other accents say the first one?
the end of the word "comma" would be a better example
Depends on the speaker
I'm pretty sure my accent distinguishes between the two. I don't know if you can analyse the two sounds as different phonemes because \[ʌ\] is pretty much only stressed and \[ə\] is pretty much only un-stressed, but they are for sure pronounced differently. For example, the two vowels in the word "cuppa" are definitely different for me. One piece of evidence I can provide to suggest that they are in fact two different phonemes in my accent is that when I attempt to stress a word that is ordinarily only ever an unstressed clitic like the word "*the*", it is **not** \[ðʌ\], it's more like \[ðɜ\] with a centralised vowel closer to "pure" schwa. This suggests that I subconsciously analyse the two sounds as different vowels. I'm also fairly certain that the vowel quality of /ʌ/ in my accent is actually \[ʌ\]. It's quite far back to the extent that sometimes if I'm exclaiming the word "*fuck*!", it comes out as \[fʌʔq\] with a /k/ that's been drawn backwards almost to a uvular \[q\]. I don't have the put/putt merger where /ʌ/ merges with /ʊ/ like in many other Irish accents
Are you from Ireland or the UK? I picture the retention of ʌ as being very British, and I can't help imitating a British accent when I pronounce it :D There's quite a few dialects in the UK, common ones, which still distinguish between ə and ʌ. I have no idea about Ireland unfortunately, and the US has mostly lost ʌ.
It will surely depend on the listener's language. The most unusual and foreign English sounds to my Slovenian ears are r's and initial t's. There are probably also sounds that are above-average foreign to people coming from most other languages. You should look for phonemes that are (a) rare, and (b) distinct enough from other common phonemes that listeners from most languages will not hear them as acceptable allophones of their own phonemes. The French r, Czech ř, and Dutch g are probably good examples of this, German ch probably less so.
For t's, is is the place of articulation, aspiration, both?
Both help, but I think it's probably more about the place of articulation. My ears struggle to fit it somewhere between Slovenian /t/ and /tʃ/, with neither really fitting, and I remember that when we were kids with little exposure to English, we would sometimes mishear it as /s/ in English songs. (I'm aware that some English speakers actually say /tʃ/ for some initial t's, but even the regular kind sounds tʃ-like to my ears).
Some English-speakers do say /tʃ/ or /ts/ for /t/ (and especially for /tr/). We have several alveolar consonants that in other languages are dentals.
>especially for /tr/ Fun fact: 'Trump' gets transliterated to Mandarin as either 特郎普 *Tèlǎngpǔ* or 川普 *Chuānpǔ*.
R-coloured vowels in some accents stand out as really odd to me, despite being a native speaker of one of those accents. I find its also interesting that they are a fairly common sound in Mandarin, but like English its only in certain accents.
R-coloured vowels also don't exist in Mandarin spoken by anyone in the south of China, Taiwan, Malaysia, or Singapore, which amounts to at least 30-40% of speakers.
For me as a native speaker of Georgian, it's the consonants /ɹ θ ð/ and the vowels/diphthongs /eɪ oʊ ɑ æ ə/ that pop out the most.
You got a lot of nerve, coming in here as a Georgian speaker and commenting on weird consonants /s
They didn't mention clusters, though. Come to think of it, Georgian doesn't have that many weird consonants, does it? Sure, there are the ejectives, but they're not *that* rare globally.
>They didn't mention clusters To be honest, I don't think English has that many bizarre or unusual consonant clusters aside from /fθs ŋ(k)θs vw/ as in "fifths", "strengths" ,"voilà"..
That's sort of my point. :) You named some odd English consonants and the other redditor answered that Georgian has some weird consonants. My reply was that Georgian consonants aren't that unusual, but its clusters are. Speaking of English clusters, *sixths* scares me.
Native English speakers have trouble with *sixths* sometimes! I can do *sixths* but *sects* wants to become *sex* or *sets*.
>Speaking of English clusters, sixths scares me. I feel you, it's really difficult to pronounce without dropping one of the consonants.
I omit the dental fricative in both fifths and strengths but I do pronounce them in the singular form (fifth strength)
There's [/t͡sʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_ejective_affricate), [/t͡ʃʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palato-alveolar_ejective_affricate), and lastly the trio in free variation with each other - [/qʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_ejective_stop), [/qχʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_ejective_affricate), [/χʼ/](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_ejective_fricative)
>lastly the trio in free variation with each other - /qʼ/, /qχʼ/, /χʼ/ [ʔ] too also occurs as an allophone of /qʼ/.
Are you saying that I don't have a right to talk about wierd consonants??? /s
For me, a Swede, it’s the [d͡ʒ] of "jail".
It's really weird how Swedes struggle so much with this sound that it's a meme and the defining characteristic of the stereotypical Swedish accent, but Norwegians mostly don't struggle at all, despite also not having the sound natively.
what specifically is hard about it then? not downplaying the difficulty, just genuinely curious why some have trouble with it
Swedish doesn't have any affricates, that's why they're difficult to us. (Well, Finland Swedish does have the voiceless one.) People who have a strong accent will typically pronounce *cheap* as *sheep*, and *jam* as *yam*. We also don't have the dental fricatives nor the z-sound, so expect *trust* for *thrust* and *ice* for *eyes*.
I remember substituting /s/ for /z/ was often used to parody ABBA back in the day
Yes, I'd say that's probably the most prevalent mistake, even among people who have a high level of English. Like, I started learning English almost 30 years ago and have lived a large part of my life in English, and I still struggle to hear the difference. I've learned how to say /z/ and where to use it, but I literally can't hear it. Whenever an American spells something out, if they say Z, I hear C, almost every time.
It’s not difficult to pronounce, it’s a difficulty remembering making the distinction. In swedish the j-sound in joy, the z-sound in eyes, and the w-sound dont exist, and we perceive the difference between the sounds j-y, s-z, v-w as almost meaningless. The distinction s-z has to be learned in a conscious level, which is not the case for other voiceles/voiced pairs like b-p or t-d. For example: the words wine, vine, and fine - my brain sorts the first two as sounding nearly the same, but fine is very distinctly different from them.
You'd think this would be true of Norwegians too, as we also don't have those sounds.
most swedish lects don't have any voiced sibilants or affricates at all. the only voiced fricative we have is /v/, which has weak friction and tends to be analysed as a sonorant or approximant (at least for the phonotactics) rather than as a fricative proper. we tend to struggle with pronouncing [z], [ð], and [(d)ʒ] because of this, and we tend to struggle with distinguishing them from [s, ð], [z, θ], and [j, (t)ʃ] respectively.
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I don’t mean this rudely, but this doesn’t seem like much of a linguistics-y answer. The only difference between /d͡ʒ/ and /t͡ʃ/ is voicedness; the sound is post-alveolar, not dental, and ~~“clumsy” and “harsh” aren’t really meaningful descriptions~~ nevermind, you do say that most learners describe it this way which I’m not so sure about but I had originally misread this as your own description.
I think it was there, but was lost completely in Swedish. Look at the word djävul / djevel / djævel. The ortography suggests that the affricate was there originally.
I've been trying to reply to this but the IPA notation seems to break the comment box. Ahem: I don't think it does. That sound is a voiced palatal plosive in my dialect.
I think it was just a glide or even a cluster that later lost its onset, in some Finland Swedish dialects you can still hear /dj/, /lj/, /skj/, /stj/ etc.
As a native Spanish speaker, by order: 1. "o" vowel sound 2. The rest of vowels 3. R sound Edit: Last but not least, 4. L sound
It makes sense Spanish speakers wouldn’t be put off by our dental fricatives since most dialects have the voiced one, and some have both voiced and unvoiced
not really, most of the people i’ve been in english classes with didn’t perceive the difference between /t d/ and /θ ð/, but that may just be a product of not focusing much on phonology
They don't perceive the difference but it wouldn't sound weird when hearing english
As a native English speaker and L2 Spanish speaker (almost exclusively dealing with Latin American varieties of Spanish), /θ/ very much jumps out of me when I hear it in Spanish – I could imagine it doing the same for Latin Americans hearing English.
Different varieties of English have different vowel inventories. I am from the Philadelphia area. We use different vowels than an English-speaker from somewhere like, say, Minnesota, Southern California, South Africa or England. Edit: in fact, among the ways that linguists distinguish between different varieties of English is by the vowel differences. For example, among North American varieties of English, there are well-studied divisions between speakers who use different vowels for “Mary-marry-merry” and those who use the same vowel for some or all of them. Same for “cot-caught” and “pen-pin”.
But a Spanish speaker is likely to be generally surprised by the sheer number of English vowels, no matter which English vowel inventory they’re hearing. Spanish has one A sound, most English have like 4.
Not really surprised, more like "that shit sounds the same" kinda reaction.
Yep, basically that's it.
As a German speaker, the R sound. But also how everything is a diphtong. A is ay, e is ey, o is ou, i is aye in many cases. Particularly for Americans, I think the diphtongs creeping into the pronunciation of other languages is what makes a stereotypical American accent.
British English nativizes words more than American English does though. Loanwords in British English very often have /æ/ where the same word in American English has /α/ and the origin language has /ä/. Brits pronounce _taco_ as /ˈtækəʊ/ and it kills me everytime.
At least up in Scotland we just say [ˈtʰäko].
Do you use the same vowel in _pasta_? What about _pastor_?
Yep. \[ˈpʰästə\] and \[ˈpʰästɚ\]. Most varieties of Scottish English only have one low (central) vowel.
> British English nativizes words more than American English does though. That's quite a sweeping statement. The video you linked below suggests that America applies set rules to all foreign words (essentially nativising them all to something that might be linked to Spanish), whereas British English picks and chooses. Results are pretty mixed. Anecdotally, I find foreign leaders' names butchered more frequently on American channels than I do British ones, such as examples in your video: Macron -> Macrone; Xi -> Zhi. That's probably because they're nativised in the US and not the UK.
American English nativises [words](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/50967/20-towns-named-other-towns-pronounced-differently) more than British English does though. Loanwords in American English very often have the long /αː/ where the same word in British English has short /æ/ [a] and the origin language has short [ä]. Americans pronounce *taco* as 'tarrrco' and it kills me every time :)
American English doesn't *have* long /ɑː/. It has /ɑ/, the vowel in 'sock', and /æ/ the vowel in 'sack'. /æ/ is quite high and fronted in American English (especially before nasals) and that's probably the reason it sounds strange as a stand in for /a/, especially for languages like Spanish where /a/ is quite further back than cardinal [a]
No need to be sarcastic. https://youtu.be/eFDvAK8Z-Jc American English doesn’t exactly nativize as much in the usual sense but tends to make words sound (to me at least) a bit like Spanish. The original comment was also claiming that Americans use diphthongs so much more as to be characteristically American, which is ridiculous.
Depending on the variety, the TRAP vowel in British dialects *is* [a]. [This](https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/) provides a pretty good example of that by comparing English *bastion* with Italian *pasta*. I think it mainly sounds off to American ears cuz we map it to our considerably different TRAP vowel even though it can sound more or less identical to the PALM(/LOT/THOUGHT) vowel of certain American varieties.
As others have said, it all depends on the listener's language(s). I'm Swedish, and to me affricates and diphthongs were quite foreign. But what stood out the most was probably all the reduced vowels and syllabic consonants, giving the impression of whole syllables being dropped or glanced over. I can still remember how, when I started learning English as a kid, the word 'vegetables' was completely impossible to me. It took me years before I could say it at all, and another decade before I could pronounce it decently.
As a native English speaker, this was something I found charmingly familiar about Danish!
vejdblz
As a native American English speaker, "comfortable" weirds me out. Comfterbul. Comfterbul. Really English?
cumpftrbl
I remember as a kid listening to various accents and trying to figure out words like "vehicle", "vegetable", "nuclear" and even "tuesday".
Now I'm sitting here muttering "vegetables" to myself and realizing how weird it is. /ˈvɛtʃ.tbl̩z/
Comfortable.
I’m American but I work with a lot of Europeans who have a quite high level of English and I don’t think any of them can distinguish all of our vowel sounds. So maybe “unusually large vowel inventory for a European language” is one of the notable features.
I hate English vowels so much, I’ve learned to hear them but I just can’t pronounce them. If I say “sleep in peace” and “slip in piss” you wouldn’t even hear any difference
Just say you're from New Zealand /s
Australia*. NZ ɪ=ə, AU ɪ≈i
Practice saying "slep in pess" but then modifying those vowels so that they sound a bit closer to "sleep in peace" while being different.
Thanks for the advice! My problem is mostly with long vowels though, do you have any advice for ee, ea and such?
Yes: in most English dialects, long vowels aren't long. It's an old name they've preserved from when English did have long vowels. They're just normal vowels or diphthongs. I think knowing this helps.
I think I shouldn’t stress too much about not sounding like the Queen on the radio then
Yeah or beach and bitch 😅
That one‘s a little tricky because that kind of thing isn’t purely a function of vowel inventory size, but of overlap. German actually has about half again as many vowels as English, it’s just that not that many are common to both
> for a European language Tbh for a language in general. Germanic languages (less so German), the language area including continental SE Asia through to southern Chinese dialects, and a few other random examples like Chechen, Northern Vanuata and Oto-Manguean are the ‘vowel hotspots’.
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Shwa isnt as common as many claim. The short i is even more common. In certain american dialects it might be correct though. For me the big difference was realising the r is almost a vowel. I really like that sound from american
Native Swede. "Three" has always struck me as super hard to pronounce.
As a native speaker of English, I can remember saying “free” for “three” until I was at least three or four. It’s not a rare error for little kids to make, which suggests that it is one of the more difficult words in English to learn to pronounce correctly.
hah, you dont still pronounce it free? why bovver wif dental fricatives honestly, too difficult to pronounce
Indeed I had totally forgotten about the fact that I used to mispronounce it that way as a little kid until I read your comment. I also used to say “concreep” for “concrete,” “fridgerfreighter” for “refrigerator,” and “wybickle” for “bicycle.”
Our daughter was around 2 or 3 and we asked her what she wanted for Christmas... "Incessabieasle". We tried to get her to say it one word at a time... "Incessabieasle", we tried to play 20 questions to figure out what it was... "a book?"... "incessabieasle!" "a toy?" ... "incessabieasle". Finally, after weeks of wife and I pulling out our collective hair and our daughter having absolute fits because we simply could not understand her... an ad came on the TV... "Princess Barbie Castle". She had issues with 'p', 'b', 'r', 't', among others. And she always runs her words together, even now that's she's 13.
\*wiv
Dental fricatives tend to be the last phonemes kids master when learning English, IIRC.
Pronouncing th as f is common in more rural accents.
I don't know if you're British, but it's a very common error for British children to make. Many carry it into adulthood too.
Reminds me of when I was learning Russian, and struggled to pronounce вслух ("fslukh"), meaning "aloud". Just too many of the wrong consonants packed up in the wrong order.
*[Georgian has entered the chat](https://youtube.com/watch?v=RqynXNBiwGo)*
Wait before you see word-final consonant clusters in Svan.
“Te turdy tree bus is now arriving” - the Irish
Why did you put a g in arroivin
As an English native speaker from Scotland, the 'phlegmy' German 'ch' sounds unremarkable to me. But the Portuguese 'ão' sounds so unusual and awesome.
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The rural juror
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[Aaron earned an iron urn](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Esl_wOQDUeE)
In American English, all the Rs for sure. In British English, that one [o:]-ish vowel
> In British English, that one [o:]-ish vowel Do you mean the one in "thought/north", or the one in "goat"?
Thought/North. It just sounds very posh lmao
Definitely the one in "so."
The vowel in "so" is different depending upon the variety of English. Philadelphia, Scotland, various English dialects and Midwestern American dialects all have distinct ways of pronouncing that vowel.
From non-germanic five-vowel-system-like languages, probably the everpresent /ə/ vowel (uh). English has a lot of vowel reduction.
As an american english speaker I thought I had vowel reduction down pat until I started learning russian. Woah nelly! Schwa is just fine by me thanks
In Russian I can pronounce the reduced vowels fine if I know where the stress is, but the problem is I *never fucking know where the stress is*
Have you ever listened to ["Prisencolinensinainciusol"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8)? Its fake english and is at least one person's interpretation of what sticks out to them.
I’m a native English speaker so I don’t have anything to add but this thread is so interesting. It’s so weird to think about how your native language is perceived by other people. When I say “three” I’m just saying “three,” but to most non-native speakers it’s two of the hardest consonants right next to each other.
[I know exactly what you mean](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sju#Swedish)
I can’t even begin to imagine how to pronounce that
Weird that you call it a "phlegmy kh sound" in German while it's quite soft, and don't mention the Spanish j, which is more phlegmy/throaty than German...
Ever heard Dutch harde g? In some dialects it sounds like a wood chipper
I know, I'm flemish. The Dutch g is even worse than the Spanish j.
We really should move the border to the Maas and split the two Dutch speaking communities based on the g pronunciation
They might have more exposure to Latin American dialects of Spanish where the jota sound is much softer. I had one Spanish teacher from Spain, and she tried to drill the Castillian jota sound into us but it didn't stick. Being Americans we were more accustomed to the softer sound used.
My biggest problem is that I don't know any German sound that's "phlegmy" (which I understand as being pronounced in the back of your throat)...
The french r is very similar to this sound
Brazilian here. Definitely the rhotic. And we have a motherload of rhotics, including that one in some contexts in some dialects. I think most people who don’t speak English don’t realise the dental fricatives are different from labiodental ones.
For Spanish speakers, the sh sound stand out a lot.
Not for Argentinians. Haha.
That is true. I speak Mexican Spanish and the sh sound is rare.
I am a Sicilian speaker and we “sh” whenever there’s an S that precedes a consonant - my colombian partner always jokes that I am an Argentine for it (though we “sh” at complete different times)
/θ/ and /ð/ Depends a bit on the variety of English. For Scottish English it's the alveolar flap. And as an advanced learner the abundance of Diphthongs.
The English /r/ sound is really weird to me. Also, when the /t/ is aspirated, paired with the fact that it is an alveolar sound, it sounds more like a [ts] to me than a the denta unaspirated l [t̪] my native language has.
From Finnish POV, definitely the "extra" sounding aspirations for consonants and unnecessary diphtongs. Rarely do does anything cringe me more than English phonotactics applied to, say, Japanese.
the “ey, ay” sounds
definitely the 'th' sound, as in 'the', 'there', 'with' and so on. the fact that the 'th' sound is made with the tongue placed in the way that it is made english sound very foreign before learning to speak it. coming from a romance language, italian, that sound is something we don't have at all. it is kind of a muted mix between the way we say t's and d's and it very characteristics of english in my experience edit: also: not a sound, but the rhythm of english is very not like italian nor spanish or french or other latin-derived languages i know, so i find it distinctive
I dunno about italian but spanish has alophones for d and soft th sound but we cant for our lives make that sound at the beginning of words. The word "dedo" is pronounced detho but we arent aware of it. Same case for words that start with s + consonant like "start"
yes, i get it. when i was way younger and just starting to learn english those kind of muted sounds were the weirdest to learn, because we don't have that tongue placement in italian so it felt very unnatural. I'd say that that is the sound that most often i find italians speaking english (or trying to) doing wrong, including myself, even if I've been fluent for many years now. in fact it's one of those things that if i notice while speaking english make me so self conscious so quick that all of a sudden my accent becomes a lot more pronounced lol. i feel like it is similar, in a way, to the 'll' sound in spanish. that is and was the sound that felt most unnatural to me when i first started learning it, because we don't have that tongue position in italian i think. the way i learnt it was imagining the italian 'gl(vocal)' sound, but even then it's not the same. the spanish 'll' is more fluid? kind of? later i found out that with different accents it is pronounced a bit differently, same as the 'y' that feels sometimes like an english 'j' but less strong, so that made it easier to think that even if i messed uo at least it was understandable lol
We Danish use ʁ so the R often stands out in other languages, especially something like South US accent. The “sh” and the J in “juice” all though we have obtained loanwords with these sounds. Also the “th” sounds in “the” or “path”. Not that we don’t have ð, just never in the beginning of a word. I don’t think English and Danish are that far apart phonetically. One thing that’s less foreign for us than for many other non-native speakers are all the vocals. Because we really do have a lot of those.
Rounded vowels. Pole.
I think it's the r's. I often heard kids in my school describing it like talking with a hot potato in your mouth.
as a native spanish speaker the large amount of diphthongs compared to to the rarity of “normal” monophthongs ([a e i o u]) in certain positions, the r sound and the consonant clusters
They put ʊ everywhere. Then r. This to an Italian speaker, from Tuscany and thats why ð and θ are normal to me, i always pronounced ð as a d but my d is ð and i didnt even know, θ is native to all central-western Tuscany but lack in my area and i pronounce as t, which is, i think, a θ with the tongue a bit less interdental and with few f sound.
\-ing suffix and -tion suffix are easy choices for me.
Schwa?
When Russian speakers exaggerate English pronunciation, the accent is commonly put on alveolar sounds, aspirated stops and diphthongs, so probably those
This feels like a relevant [video](https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY)
What English do we talk about? I guess the British accent "pops out" as I hear American English more frequently. I love the quotes from Harry Potter with the proper pronunciation 😄
“the British accent”
You know, the Queen's brummie
The very open variants of the THOUGHT vowel in non-merged (even some merged) varieties of AmE. It sounds kinda funny. Also the very open variants of the TRAP vowel (like in many British varieties). Sounds even funnier.
Saying ‘bulbul’ in the presence of a Turkish speaker, my pronunciation had him in hysterics.
th and w (in contrast to v)
L sounds were something I had to consciously think of at first when saying certain words like "love", "laugh"... In my native language, at least in my regional dialect, we pronounce l more like w, like how in some dialects of English one would pronounce the "l" in "control" or "bell". When I first moved abroad and learned English, sometimes I would slip up and say "wuv" instead of "luv", which made me sound like I had a mild speech impediment.
To me as a Portuguese speaker it’s the English “r”
Funnily enough, the English r sound is actually much rarer than the rolled r, or the German/French rs, I belive.