1·
8 minutes agoI would think is a problem for English natives is the consonants themselves, because we have a lot of them and many don’t exist in English.
I am not an Arabic speaker at all, but one of the few amusing points of the Iraq was was that absolutely no one in the U.S. media could agree on how to pronounce Qatar. There were even segments on how to pronounce it. They didn’t agree with each other.
Of course, they never actually put someone who spoke Arabic on TV to get them to pronounce it properly. They probably couldn’t anyway considering the intelligence level of news anchors I’ve worked with.
And, to be fair, there are millions of U.S. citizens who speak English as a second language.
About 1 in 10 according to the U.S. census do not speak English at home.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/languages-we-speak-in-united-states.html
Spanish is first, Chinese a distant second. I am guessing there are also plenty of indigenous people, especially in Alaska considering its isolation, who primarily speak native languages at home.