Hardest sound to pronounce-independent ofthe motherlanguage?

Chispa   Thu Mar 04, 2010 4:37 pm GMT
English and spanish 'th'? Portuguese and french nasals?Guttural r?
Spanish's and portuguese's ñ and ll? Chinese 'rui'?...

Which sound is more laborious for a person who never pronounced it?

Which sound the difficulty is a folklore-is very easy despite people say it is hard?
Rolled Rs are pussies.   Thu Mar 04, 2010 4:49 pm GMT
The Spanish rolled "R" is much easier than people suggest it is, people talk as if the fact the Spanish "R" is rolled is a massive barrier to learning the language or something, which is nonsense, the R is easy.
James   Thu Mar 04, 2010 4:58 pm GMT
English 'th' is quite hard. Not the actual sound itself but rather the fact taht you have to stop in the middle of the speech and put your tongue between your teeth. It's odd.
marcellus minimus   Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:06 pm GMT
<<English 'th' is quite hard. Not the actual sound itself but rather the fact taht you have to stop in the middle of the speech and put your tongue between your teeth. It's odd. >>

Is the English "th" any harder than the Spanish "th" ("d" and also "z"/"c" in some places)? Of course, Spanish has both "d/c/z" as well as that nasty "rr".
schlechtes vorbild   Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:19 pm GMT
one way to think about this question is probably to think about the sounds that natives of a language learn last as children. native English speakers take a while to learn "th"..little kids will often say "i fink" instead of "i think"
Thor   Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:33 pm GMT
Indeed, the english "th" is one of the most difficult sounds of the neighbor languages of France), not the pronunciation itself, but to have the reflex to pronounce it well (in France, I often hear the sounds "ze car", sometimes "de car"...). Same thing with the spanish equivalent (ex : izquerda, decir).

Obviously, we don't talk about less relative languages (african ones), but even some slavic ones can have a very hard phonology.
schlechtes vorbild   Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:45 pm GMT
yes, there are at least two levels of difficulty here:

1) pronouncing the phoneme itself

2) difficulty of using the phoneme in actual speech, between and among other phonemes
a   Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:15 pm GMT
what about arabic ulvars?
Phonetic   Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:17 pm GMT
I particulary think this word is very hard,the most difficult,although no individual phoneme be difficult : 'world'.
Is a very hard consonantal meeting 'r' and 'l'.And 'd' also.
I think you must put the tip of the tongue in ur palate.I dont know.

In spanish,i think that Ñ and ll can be surprisingly difficult.
And the guy said right, rolled 'r' exists in many languages and is very easy to learn.
Russian is hard   Thu Mar 04, 2010 7:54 pm GMT
р vs. рь
б vs. бь
в vs. вь
ж vs. ш vs. щ
Franco   Thu Mar 04, 2010 8:20 pm GMT
Spanish in general has very high articulatory tension. The rest of languages tend to be have more "mumbling-like" pronunciation, that is, require less articulatory tension and thus are easier to pronounce.
GuestUser   Thu Mar 04, 2010 8:53 pm GMT
If I understand Franco right, I do agree somewhat. Everything in Spanish is pronounced, even the more difficult sounds like the lisped C, Z (Castilian), and as a result its easy to get tongue-tied.
JGreco   Thu Mar 04, 2010 9:10 pm GMT
I always have to laugh when people say Spanish is so easy to pronounce due to the majority of words sounding the way they are spelled. But what many seem to forget that if certain phonemes are not mastered in Spanish, one will always sound like a non-native. For example, there are several phonemes that are different between English and Spanish that many think are the same. In English, the letters d, t, p, r, rr, ~n, ll, and y are pronounced differently from all Spanish accents. In addition, c,s, and z are pronounced differently from Peninsular Spanish.
JGreco   Thu Mar 04, 2010 9:15 pm GMT
When I hear a non-native speakers talking Spanish, I typically can tell they are non-native speakers by the way they pronounce their D's (pronounced softer in Spanish than in English, their P's (pronounced closed in English and open in Spanish), and their T's (this is the main pronunciation that I can tell is different. It is pronounced very strongly in English, and somewhere between an English T and TH in Spanish).
Steak 'n' Chips   Thu Mar 04, 2010 10:12 pm GMT
The Welsh LL sound is hard to get right, without collapsing in a fit of choking and spitting.

Arabic 'ayn takes a little time to get the hang of, although it's not really hard work. Arabic hamza might be hard for those who don't have glottal stops in their languages (Easy for us lazy-speaking Brits though).

I find it hard to get Arabic heavy D clearly distinguished from light d, and similarly heavy T distinguished from light t (they're all different phonemes and script letters).

I find the right prounciation of "ch" in German "ich" hard to get spot on. I'm always being corrected; it's different from the guttural "ch" I'm used to from "loch".

I never got the hand of holding a trilled R. I can muster up a short trilled "r" but I never do justice to a Spanish "rr" where you need to hold it (I've got a tongue tie, so maybe that gets in the way).

I found all Japanese sounds nice and straightforward.

Other than my limited stabs at those languages, I'm pretty sure there are some real tongue-twister sounds in some southern African languages, which use odd click sounds and the like. Aren't there some awkward sounds in some native American languas as well?