I recognise the frustration in this comment and it’s not fair that Indians were singled out, especially because of how few English speakers speak native Indian dialects

What’s interesting about the comment though is that to the native English speaking ear the ‘v’ in ‘Avatar’ is definitely not pronounced ‘w’. I would say this confusion points to a difference in how the sounds are differentiated in the native dialects. Similar (but to a lesser degree) to how a native English speaker would struggle to ‘hear’ sounds in a tonal language that they didn’t speak natively

I apologise, I didn’t mean to single us out. I’m a native Tamil speaking Indian raised in Chennai. I used to make the v w switch as a child and someone corrected me. Ever since then, I notice others making it and considered it peculiar and interesting. I never attributed it to distinct ‘va’ sounds in our local languages but just figured we learned English incorrectly.

In many Slavic languages there's a concept of "soft" and "hard" consonants. In Russian and Ukrainian, for example, whether the consonant is of either kind is determined by either the vowel that follows it or a special other letter, or, in case of Ukrainian, an apostrophe. In Polish, there's a diacritic sign for the same purpose, which is for some reason reversed for L.

Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is:

    * мат (carpet)
    * мать (mother)
    * мять (crumple)
    * мят (crumpled)

All four words usually sound the same to an English speaker. It's usually easier to tell the first two from the last two.

I’m not American, but I after living here - I’ve noticed a few. They sometimes say “axe” for “ask”. They fail to enunciate “respiratory” fully - they say “res-pah-tory”. Also, they fail to pronounce the f in fifth - like they say fith. Certain words like “squirrel” tend to get squished into “skwol” while I’m used to pronouncing it in two syllables. I’m trying to think of similar examples.

Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!

Oh, and in Hebrew, while it's not acknowledged by the speakers themselves, there's also two different ways to pronounce "L" ("lamed"), while English speakers only utilize one of the two ways. So, they manage to say "lomed" (לומד, studies) more or less correctly, but "lo" (לא, no) sounds funny to a native speaker, because the "L" is supposed to be "soft".

Native English speakers when trying to speak Portuguese find it hard to speak A with tilde (~). Like when they say "São Paulo" they say "Sao Paulo". Ã is the nasal A, which sounds like the U in "sun" and "burn", while the standard A sounds the same as in "car".

I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...

My friend from Czechia struggled while pronouncing Polish words including /w/ sound represented by "ł" letter.

What I find interesting is that /w/ sound

> V západoslovanských jazycích navazuje na praslovanskou nonpalatální souhlásku [ɫ]

which is still partially present in the eastern regions of Poland and is associated with sort of "sophisticated" pronunciation used by early 20th century actors - and thus it's also known as "performative ł" or "kresowe ł", or "dark l" in English. It is similar to Arabic "l" present in Allah word.