MrR: Unlike the person who asked me yesterday the same question, you probably already realized, that knowing a foreign language grammar and vocabulary and being able to apply it into daily use in a textual media is far different from speaking it aloud. If one's tongue is not used to making those phonemes, it will definitely sound like that. Rhythm and intonation also takes time to learn.
Voice samples by me speaking English, Finnish and Japanese, can be found on the previous page.
Comparison of the lists of phonemes used in Finnish, English and Japanese (in IPA, source: Wikipedia):
Vowels:
-.Finnish.:.a.ɑ.....e...i...o...u...y.æ.ø
-.Japanese:.a.......e...i...o...ɯ
-.English.:.a.ɑ.ʌ.ɒ.e.ɛ.i.ɪ.o.ɔ.u.ʊ...æ...ɜ.ɚ.ə
Consonants:
-.Finnish.:.m.n.ŋ.p.b.t.d.k.g.f.ʋ.....s...ʃ.........h...l.j.r
-.Japanese:.m.n.ŋ.p.b.t.d.k.ɡ.ɸ.......s.z.ʃ.tʃ.ʒ.dʒ.h.ɰ...j.ɺ̠
-.English.:.m.n.ŋ.p.b.t.d.k.ɡ.f.v.θ.ð.s.z.ʃ.tʃ.ʒ.dʒ.h.w.l.j.ɹ
Diphthongs are not listed (I broke them apart and listed their individual vowel components instead), because I don't consider them relevant. Similarly, vowel length markers (ː) were removed.
Phonemes listed in orange color only occur in foreign loan words.
Note: Period characters do not indicate phonemes. I inserted them to ensure spacing. For some reason, Firefox/phpBB does not let me post nbsp characters, and
does not allow me to enlarge the text.
As you can see, English (and Japanese) contain many sounds that are quite foreign (or impossible to distinguish) to a Finnish speaker. It takes a lot of practise to get them right and natural. Japanese being a little bit easier than English.
(In comparison, learning Finnish pronounciation should be easy for an English speaker because of the lesser number of phonemes. In practise, that assumption fails, because English speakers tend to think in terms of diphthongs, so when try to read "ee" /eː/, they produce what sounds more like "ii" (/iː/) or "ei" (/ei/), for example. And there's the consonant aspiration thing as well. English reader's "kit" sounds like "khit" to a Finnish person. It seems to be very difficult to eliminate the aspiration if that's how you've learned to do since childhood.
For Japanese speakers, the biggest hurdle seems to be that they're taught in the syllabylary. Consonant clusters, or words ending in a consonant, magically get that "i" or "u" in them, and it is really noticeable to non-Japanese people.)
