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I'm intrigued as to what you mean by 'incapable of acquiring the phonemes of a new language'. If that is the only limit on adult language acquisition, then it s

I'm intrigued as to what you mean by 'incapable of acquiring the phonemes of a new language'. If that is the only limit on adult language acquisition, then it seems like it would follow as a native English speaker, I should be able to learn Japanese to a higher level than a native speaker of Japanese would be able to learn English. That is because Japanese only has a few sounds that English doesn't, whereas English has a lot more sounds than Japanese. Something about that doesn't feel right, so I hope you will be able to explain if I am missing something. However, were it to be true, it sounds like the best way of 'futureproofing' children's early language education so that they can learn languages later in life is to bring them up to speak, at least at a basic level, a set of languages that covers a large proportion if not all of the distinct phonemes of all languages.

TechBro8615 3y ago
I suspect you're right that an adult will be able to achieve "nearer" phonetic fluency in a language that shares more phonemes with their first language than they would in one that has little phonetic overlap with it. So a Spanish speaker will have an easier time becoming fluent in Italian than would an English speaker, etc. (I'm surprised by your assertion that Japanese has large phoneme overlap with English, but I don't know much about it - it just seems surprising to me.) I'd be curious to see a visualization of the overlapping phonemes between languages, like a large Venn diagram kinda thing (or maybe just a graph). I think this data is probably available and a visualization wouldn't be too difficult to create - maybe it already exists but I couldn't find a comprehensive one with a brief search.
- kian 3y ago
  I love the idea of a visualization of overlapping language phonetics! something that showed both the hierarchical nesting of languages and the actual phonemes themselves. Besides tsu and dzu, every phoneme in Japanese is accounted for in the Spanish language. I believe that the Spanish phonemes are a nearly perfect subset of English phonemes.

TechBro8615 3y ago

I suspect you're right that an adult will be able to achieve "nearer" phonetic fluency in a language that shares more phonemes with their first language than they would in one that has little phonetic overlap with it. So a Spanish speaker will have an easier time becoming fluent in Italian than would an English speaker, etc. (I'm surprised by your assertion that Japanese has large phoneme overlap with English, but I don't know much about it - it just seems surprising to me.) I'd be curious to see a visualization of the overlapping phonemes between languages, like a large Venn diagram kinda thing (or maybe just a graph). I think this data is probably available and a visualization wouldn't be too difficult to create - maybe it already exists but I couldn't find a comprehensive one with a brief search.

kian 3y ago
I love the idea of a visualization of overlapping language phonetics! something that showed both the hierarchical nesting of languages and the actual phonemes themselves. Besides tsu and dzu, every phoneme in Japanese is accounted for in the Spanish language. I believe that the Spanish phonemes are a nearly perfect subset of English phonemes.