Impossible languages
<< People who don't pronounce Spanish properly are just lazy. You can learn how to pronouce every possible Spanish word in just one hour. >>
Wow.
For you pronouncing Spanish might be a piece of cake, for some others it's not.
No need to boast something you didn't earn. In this case your ability to learn Spanish pronunciation easily.
Saludos
Not even an hour, someone who's never learned any Spanish would be able to read 80% of a Spanish text correctly.
Todo el mundo podria pronunciar estas lineas casi correctamente, algo que es imposible con cualquier otro idioma.
English speakers will find it difficult to pronounce many of the vowels and consonants of Spanish correctly because while they have close counterparts in English, they are not exactly the same, so English speakers will have a strong accent when they speak Spanish.
Accent is not bad as long as it is understandable. You can speak Spanish perfectly with nice English accent.
<< Not even an hour, someone who's never learned any Spanish would be able to read 80% of a Spanish text correctly.
Todo el mundo podria pronunciar estas lineas casi correctamente, algo que es imposible con cualquier otro idioma. >>
You forgot:
Finnish
Turkish
and some other languages
<<Not even an hour, someone who's never learned any Spanish would be able to read 80% of a Spanish text correctly.>>
Unless you are an English speaker in witch case you will never pronounce Spanish properly (and this is true not only for Spanish).
English speakers can't pronounce rolled 'r' and have tendency to alter plain vowels to diphthongs.
<<That's cuz they're stupid, Spanish has by far the easiest pronunciation, if they can't pronounce Spanish then they won't be able to pronounce any other language.>>
It difficult to produce sounds that you are not used to; it has nothing to do with intelligence. Pronunciation/diction is a physical excersize and not a mental one. English speakers have problems with 'r' in spanish, among other things.
<<Not even an hour, someone who's never learned any Spanish would be able to read 80% of a Spanish text correctly.>>
What about someone who is unfamilar with latin script?
<<Todo el mundo podria pronunciar estas lineas casi correctamente, algo que es imposible con cualquier otro idioma.>>
Bullshit. If you are talking about ORTHOGRAPHICAL rules, than spanish isn't easier than any other language that has a logical, phonetic spelling (German, Italian, Latin, greek ect....)
Italian is much harder than Spanish. You have to learn words with double consonants. A word may have three or four double consonants and that is hard to remember.
<<Accent is not bad as long as it is understandable. You can speak Spanish perfectly with nice English accent.>>
See, we are talking about completely different things here. This whole argument is just a misunderstanding.
1)Pronunciation (not reading), is the physical act of reproducing the sounds of a foreign language. This is no simple task, and it takes vocal training. If someone has a heavy accent, then they are NOT pronunciating well.
2)Orthography, is the rules for writing and reading a language, which is very straitforward for Spanish in addition to ALL other languages that have a logically consistent phonetic spelling system.
You can pronunciate a foreign language well with some accent.
<<Italian is much harder than Spanish.>>
LOL!! Bullshit! Both languages have very simple and straitforward orthograph. Almost every romance language except french has simple orthographical rules, allowing one to predict how any word is supposed to be pronunced, based on its spelling. There is nothing exceptional about Spanish.
<<You have to learn words with double consonants.>>
Not difficult.
accent and ability to speak a language are very different; you CAN speak Spanish, Czech, Chinese... with an American accent. Same as there are millions of Americans that speak/read/write English a primary language with Italian, Turkish, Mexican, Vietnamese.... accents.
With people struggling in language classes it's usually more about effort/motiovation. Most say Americans especially in the past viewed Spanish class as: "just do what it takes to make a grade" and not "I really want to learn this". It's changing a bit since more people realize bilingual=more money.
Observe a simple phenomena: I was just in Italy, with Italians over say 35, I mainly used Spanish to communicate, relying on mutual intelegibility factors (the fact that Italian to me sounded like a very slow and deliberately pronounced language helped alot as my Spanish is somewhat passive/intermediate level). Over 35 Italians however may answer "Prego" when you ask "do you speak English?" (which is an early sign that the answer is at best, very poorly", but younger Italians are more motivated to learn English and often spoke it very well with clear pronunciation.
Now as for the point of the thread; probably not, but again there are mental blocks. I'm 24; American, learned a fair amount of Spanish growing-up and then later Czech and Polish. Czech and Polish involved alot of work overcoming blocks on sounds that just registered, to my nasal voweler American English speaking ears, as gutteral and frictive consonant clusters that were very odd and unpleasent, but I do international affairs and my region is East-Central Europe. So, I had strong financial/proffesional motivation to overcome this feeling and ultimately got used to it. I now would like to learn at least some German, but I have the same problem except maybe x5 trying to listen to German. So it can probably be very difficult, consider these are blocks within Indo-European languages (and with German within a closer sub-grouping).
LOL, the Chinese have been much more pragmatic.... so they are making English quasi/pseudo-official and themselves quasi/pseudo-bilingual...
I've been thinking that many of you (I mean, those with Latin letters as their native script) should find it quite easy to acquire loads of good materials... but the rule of thumb does conclude that, even with the best materials on earth, you could learn terribly messily....and badly.
Before I study phonetics, all I can say now is... well, you have a mouth for articulating, and the good news is... you even have two ears, instead of one, to listen. Yea, it's indeed yet another type of philosophy, that of learning in general. It's not really just motivation. Saying something is good to learn isn't motivating enough. I'd take a somewhat extremist stance, namely that "saying NOT learning something could be terribly bad".
One of your compatriots, Farber, has already addressed how economically damaging it could be NOT to be know anything beyond English.