Italian & French Missing English "H"

Livio   Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:11 am GMT
If I'm not mistaken, Italian and French don't have an English-sounding "H" in their languages. With that in mind, do you think that if Italian and French people only learned their languages for a certain amount of years and they started learning English, pronouncing the English "H" would be a problem?
French   Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:34 am GMT
English H sound is very easy to pronounce! Spanish or German X sounds are a bit harder but nothing impossible.....
PARISIEN   Sat Apr 11, 2009 9:37 am GMT
This is not so much a problem. Many French pronounce an aspirated 'h' in such words like "haine", "haïr" (hate, to hate) or "honte" (shame), probably to add expressivity.
As far as I'm concerned I recently noticed I always pronounce "Le Havre" with an aspiration, I don't know why.
Guest   Sat Apr 11, 2009 12:33 pm GMT
<<English H sound is very easy to pronounce! Spanish or German X sounds are a bit harder but nothing impossible.....
>>

In the Spanish dialect I speak, as in South American Spanish, J sounds like English H. J is pronounced as /x/ only in Castilian Spanish , in some parts of Mexico and in Argentina. Most of Spanish speaker don't use it.
Don   Sat Apr 11, 2009 1:14 pm GMT
<<In the Spanish dialect I speak, as in South American Spanish, J sounds like English H. J is pronounced as /x/ only in Castilian Spanish , in some parts of Mexico and in Argentina. Most of Spanish speaker don't use it.>>

This topic's covering Italian and French, not Spanish. We all already know Spanish has an English H type sound: Spanish J.
Spanish American   Sat Apr 11, 2009 8:01 pm GMT
the closest h for the french would be their r's
r=jw,Spanish j with a w or u.
vrai would be vjwe vhwe.
Guest   Sun Apr 12, 2009 9:11 am GMT
We all already know Spanish has an English H type sound: Spanish J.


Not only J is pronounced that way but G when followed by E and/or I.