Hello
How hard is it for native speakers of English to gain native-like pronunciation in the following languages?
1. Spanish
2. Russian
3. Japanese
My friends say Japanese is the easiest of all major languages to pronounce correctly, while Russian is the hardest.
Please tell me your opinions. If you speak or have learnt one of these languages, do you or other foreign speakers generally sound native-like or very foreign, or what?
I read in another thread about foreigners who learn English having big problems losing their accents, is it just as difficult in these languages aswell?
Thank you.
Macbeth, of the languages you listed, I've only just begun to study Spanish, but I studied Russian for several years. I haven't noticed a general ability of the students to pronounce one language better than the other. In both languages, some people seemed to have absolutely no ability to imitate the sound of the target language, some sounded about as close to native as you can get when you start as an adult, and there was about the same distribution between the extremes.
I think Spanish should be the easiest to immitate for the Americans, especially for those who grew up in areas heavily populated by Hispanics... I think Deborah has mentioned something about picking up a lot of Spanish while growin up...
Vytenis, certainly if you are exposed to one language more than another, that would help you acquire a good accent, but exposure aside, I don't think Spanish is easier to pronounce than Russian.
Well, for me many Americans speaking Spanish sounded impressivlely native-like. On the other hand, wheneve I hear an American speaking Russian, it is always heavily accented. Of course, since I am not a spanish-speaker myself, my judgement may be subjective.
All languages are more or less equally easy to pronounce, but they may not be equally easy to pronounce when they are learned as second languages.
Even so, anyone can eventually acquire native pronunciation in a foreign language with sufficient careful practice. It's an ambitious goal with few advantages, so most people don't bother, but it's certainly possible.
If you hear Americans pronouncing Spanish more correctly than Russian, it's probably just because they put more effort into pronouncing Spanish correctly, and/or they simply have more experience with it.
From what I've seen of these other three languages, I'd guess that Spanish would be the closest to English, and Russian the most distant. The usefulness of each as a second language would also fall in the same order, for Americans.
It probably would be a good idea for more Americans to start learning Mandarin over the long term, which I've considered myself (but there are several things I don't like about Chinese, including the phonemic use of tones and the written language).
Mxsmanic, though, Japanese *pronunciation*, orthographic issues aside, is probably the easiest for English. Japanese has a *very* simple syllable structure, which is either V, CV, or CVn (technically, it doesn't have diphthongs, but rather just adjacent vowels in separate syllables, phonemically), and only things that it has which most English dialects don't have, at a phonemic level, is that it uses [4] where most English-speakers would expect [r\], [l], or [5], syllable-final /n/ is technically syllabic, it uses [M] where English would have [u], it uses [p\] where most English-speakers would expect [f], it has phonemic vowel length, and it never diphthongizes vowels. All of these in practice, at least from my experience, are not problematic at all. It has a relatively small phonemic consonant inventory, and a quite small vowel inventory, vowel length aside (/a/, /i/, /M/, /e/, /o/, and their long counterparts).
Compared to this, technically Castilian has /T/, [D] (an allophone of /d/ technically), /L/, /J/, more complex syllables than Japanese, and quite a number of different diphthongs and triphthongs. While /T/ and [D] are not things that English-speakers should have problems with, they are still phonemes which Japanese lacks. Also, many Spanish dialects may merge /T/ with /s/, and /L/ with /j/, which simplifies matters. While one could argue that Castilian isn't much harder for an English-speaker to pronounce than Japanese (and is much nicer at the orthographic level than Japanese), it is most definitely more easy than Russian, from what I know about it...
But the initial question was, "How hard is it for native speakers of English to gain native-like pronunciation in the following languages?"
Does no one but me think that most English speakers don't sound like native in Japanese, Spanish or Russian?
I should expand what I said above: most people who learn a foreign language at any age other than early childhood don't sound like native speakers.
It really all depends on your exposure. I find Spanish easy to pronounce, but that's because I was exposed to the language somewhat early on.
I'm undecided on whether Japanese or Spanish are easier, but I CAN say the Russian would most definitely be the hardest of all three (assuming the English speaker has had no experience with any of these). First of all, the "palatized" vowels are not a concept that will be easily grasped by most people. Secondly, you could speak Russian with a completely flawless accent and you would still come off as a foreigner because your speech sounds too "formal."