Why do foreign speakers have trouble pronouncing certain sounds?
People have trouble with sounds that don’t exist in the language (or languages) that they first learned as a young child. We are born capable of both producing and perceiving all of the sounds of all human languages. In infancy, a child begins to learn what sounds are important in his or her language, and to disregard the rest. By the time you’re a year old, you’ve learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that don’t matter in your own language. The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language. German speakers learning English, for example, are likely to have trouble with the sounds found at the beginning of the words wish and this, because those sounds don’t exist in German. So they may pronounce them instead as v and z – similar sounds that do occur in German. On the other hand, the German words schöne (‘beautiful’) and müde (‘tired’) contain vowel sounds that don’t exist in English – so native English speakers learning German
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