> For what it's worth, though, I've been told by Japanese people that it's much easier for native English speakers to pronounce Japanese correctly than it is for native Japanese speakers to pronounce English properly. We have a number of sounds they don't (the consonants v, l and r, for instance).
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> I wonder if difficulty in pronounciation is more relative than difficulty in other things? I.e. if you come from a language in which there are a lot of varied sounds, pronouncing foreign languages is probably easier than it would be for a person whose native tongue is more limited.

Interestingly, the Neuroquest page in the October 2002 issue of Discover magazine mentioned that one of the reasons Japanese people have trouble with r's and l's is because, since their language does not distiguish between the sounds, they lose the ability to differentiate between the sounds. The article also mentioned that there are three sounds that *all* sound like "t"'s to English speakers, since English does not distinguish between them, but they sound like different sounds to a native speaker of Tamil, since the Tamil language does distinguish between them.

Lucky "That was Experiment 2 in an article illustrating that the brain digitizes its perceptions." Wizard