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From Italy here, can confirm. It is more than accent tho: has something to do by not being exposed to the full spectrum of sound the humans can produce. We Ita

From Italy here, can confirm. It is more than accent tho: has something to do by not being exposed to the full spectrum of sound the humans can produce. We Italians can't say the th right, because we cannot even _listen_ it right. We can't just process the sound, yet alone reproduce it. Then we get on internet and we learn written English, but since the rules are inconsistent we mostly are left to make wild guesses as their sounds and English pronunciation is extremely irregular. Most of the complexity comes from having to know if a word radix is or isn't saxon and apply a different set of pronunciation rules, so for example think -ice- which has very different sounds in different words in two groups or this about "A/I/E" https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable

tripzilch 11y ago
> but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable hah, IMO that's because they mixed the music way too loud in that clip :) I can make out most of it, but definitely not the very first bit. I guess if it had been Dutch, I'd also have trouble understanding everything--though perhaps a bit less because like you imply, I'm better trained at separating "Dutch sounds" from background noise. This is the reason why I really prefer to watch English TV or movies with (English) subtitles. It's one thing to understand what they say, it's another thing to be able to make it out in the first place.