GeorginaS said:
I want to know what a "tounge" is.
It's difficult to describe how to place one's mouth to pronounce words, isn't it?
VietDao29, have you tried looking at
www.dictionary.com? They have sound on their site so when you search the definition of a word there's an icon of a little speaker to click on right next to the word. When you click on it, a voice says the word out loud. You can get an idea of how the word should sound from there.
Here's the kicker. In a continuous spectrum of sound, the vowel sound for example, there's an infinite number of sounds along that spectrum. Growing up, one learns to identify several small segments of sound as language and the rest are the extraneous sounds that one might make because of a slight stutter, a space filling "uh", or whatever. The filtering occurs without a person even thinking about it. You have to learn how to even
hear the letters before you can learn to say them.
Each language identifies its own little segments as a language sound and, usually, the segments are divided up similiarly enough that a people speaking different languages can at least identify not only which sounds are language, but even identify a Spanish "ah", English "ah", etc. Reproducing the other language's sound is a different story, which is why it's so hard to lose an accent if you try to learn a foreign language later on in life. You learned the sounds of language when you were so young that the process is almost subconscious and takes some work to overcome.
There's always exceptions where different languages might not even have the same number of sound segments. Some of those sound segments from a different language just have to share the same slot in your brain's library of sound segments. There is nowhere to put a "ch" and "dg" if you've only got a "zh" drawer in your cabinet.
Actually, a person winds up just adding new drawers as legitimate language sounds if they really want to have any hope of losing their accent when speaking the new language. Continuously trying to correlate foreign language sounds to your own language sounds condemns yourself to never losing your accent when speaking the new language. So the person needs a "ch" drawer, a "dg" drawer, and his original "zh" drawer and it's not that hard to learn when each drawer is appropriate.
Why do you think Russian words have such horrible spellings when written in the English alphabet instead of cyrillic? The sounds from language just don't transport perfectly into the other.
All I can say is that it will take some time to learn how to hear the difference between the two sounds and you have to watch the person say it to really learn it (could be on TV or video, but in person usually works best).
