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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

The difference is, I grew up learning English ;-) Seriously though, I tried learning Chinese, but for the life of me I couldn't tell the difference between the tones. They all sounded the same to me. I don't know if it's related, but I don't have an ear for music (Music does nothing for me so I have never listened to it by choice). Spanish on the other hand is amazing. I know an handful of languages, but Spanish by far had the fewest oddities. It is amazing how regular it is.

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As a Chinese, when I learn English,

first is to notice the difference of the pronunciation for foreign languages, I believe same as music singer, for word "Porshe", french will read "e" as "ei", English just mute, German says in the middle, but that's hard for me to memorize it in the middle, Chinese has same sound as "ei". Brain is not getting use to the iconic differences of the sound.

second is to correct pronounce the sound, pronunciation of "th" took me one week to practice, because Chinese does not have "th", only "s", that's why lots of Chinese says "sank you" instead of "thank you", that muscle to pronounce that is simply not trained since was born.

"th" (ð/θ) is definitely the hardest phoneme(s) in English, even for native-speaking children.

Much to the disappointment of her mother who thought "fumb" was cute, I once taught a 3-year-old how to pronounce "th" by telling her to stick her tongue between her teeth and breathe out. Maybe a similarly position-focused (rather than sound-focused) approach would help non-native speakers as well?

Noun genders and never-ending verb endings are the drawbacks to Latin-based languages, for a second language learner. Perhaps Spanish with a single gender and English style verbs would be the simplest.

I find Spanish grammar very easy but it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to understand certain accents -- for example Dominican Spanish is really hard for me to understand.

I've found certain Spanish accents, in English, very hard to understand as well. The way Cubans can drop whole consonants[0] ("Smith's" can become "hmi'") is particularly vexing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Spanish#Phonology

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