Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

[Bedelato]

Ooh, what bad luck. I'm going to kill you if you don't. I have 14 bombs placed strategically around your house. Pronounce a series of breathy and creaky voiced vowels and consonants or the bombs will go off.

You have 3 hours.

Breathy vowels I'm actually pretty good at. It's breathy consonants that are hard. Not hard to pronounce, just hard to percieve in opposition to other types of voicing. Especially with stops.

Creaky voice is pretty much out of my league right now.

Other than that, I can do pretty much everything else on the chart, including clicks, implosives, and ejectives, with a few exceptions that I don't feel like pinning down right now.

...Oh yeah, I cannot do labiodental flaps [ⱱ]

[Qwynegold]

Sounds I think I can pronunce correctly: [ʙ r̼ ɬ ʝ ɺ].

Sounds that I have serious difficulties with: [ɴ ʀ ʁ ɯ ʊ ɤ ɨ ɥ], epiglottals, pharyngeals, non-initial stress, velarized consonants other than ɫ, pharyngealized consonants, nasal release, lateral release, level tones.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

ʊ

How do you pronounce "ost"?

[Qwynegold]

ʊ

How do you pronounce "ost"?

['ust]

[Astraios]

So far, I have serious difficulty with different flavours of click (voiced, nasalized, etc.), with epiglottals except /ʜ/, and with the central vowels except /ə/ in between (but excluding) /ɐ/ and /ɨ/.

I think I'm fine with basically everything else.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

['ust]

Where are you originally from?

[*Ceresz]

what about thy/thigh? it's a minimal pair!

I don't know, maybe I have /D/. I'm just confused now.

Try it with the old "putting the hand on the throat"-trick to see if it's voiced or not .

ʊ

How do you pronounce "ost"?

['ust]

Really ?

[Jipí]

Throaty stuff. I.e. [qɢɴħʕʜʢʡ].
And central and unrounded vowels. I.e. [ɨʉɘɵɜɞɯɤʌ].
And Danish /ð/, and Swedish /ɧ/ (though aiui that's commonly realized as [xʷ~ʃ]), and Russian <ы>.

[äreo]

BTW, [ɤ] is actually what I usually have for /ʊ/ in English. So it's very easy to pronounce unrounded back vowels with that as reference point.

[Neon Fox]

so I can pronounce many Hindi words and things like "Llewellyn" correctly.

Not if you're pronouncing it how you wrote it there.

Yeah, yeah, it was off the top of my head.

[Bristel]

Things like [t͡ɬʼ] are fairly easy for me to pronounce, but the difference between [x χ] is much harder for me to pronounce.

I think I can pronounce [ʕ] but I haven't recorded it and checked it.

[----]

I can do implosives, ejectives, pharangeal consonants, breathy voice, creaky voice, clicks all that 'difficult stuff' and I cannot for the life of me trill an r, either alveolar or uvular. It's so embarrasing o:

[Ambessalion]

i can't pronounce !kung the proper way

[Radius Solis]

Implosives are largely terra incognita for me; I cannot reliably do them even in isolation, and despite having read various instructions for them it just doesn't seem to happen. Sound samples are no help: nothing I can do sounds much like them.

Whereas ejectives are dead easy to me now. I love ejectives. Occasionally I randomly substitute them for voiceless plosives in my speech to see if anyone will notice. (They never do, not even pharazon who knows very well what ejectives are like).

The anterior click articulations are all easy for me now too, including producing them in context in initial position, and even in medial positions where they are far less often found in nature. Their posterior articulations, aka "accompaniments", are much harder to get right! I can do the [k g ŋ] ones fairly reliably, but none of the others.

I'm shaky on pharyngeals and even uvulars though.

[*Ceresz]

Swedish /ɧ/ (though aiui that's commonly realized as [xʷ~ʃ]), and Russian <ы>.

I asually just have /x/, or maybe even /x_w/. Not sure. I tend to juat describe it as [x] though.

[Kvan]

I struggle with palatal plosives, fricatives and affricates. In general I tend to neglect them because even as I try to emulate the sounds they always sound like [Consonant]+j. Even worse it seems is palatization, my onset time for j is too long or at least it seems so because my received pronunciation always sounds like two seperate phones.

[Cathbad]

Emphatics seem like they should be easy for most English speakers, because most English speakers have [5].

[5], but not /l/ vs. /5/. So maybe not.

[Radius Solis]

Emphatics seem like they should be easy for most English speakers, because most English speakers have [5].

[5], but not /l/ vs. /5/. So maybe not.

Agreed. Worse, since many of us don't even have true [l] as a phone, there's nothing to compare our "dark L" with. So it's hard to mentally separate its two main features [+lateral] and [+RTR] as these are normally all one package together in my speech. It's true I also have another retracted tongue root consonant, the one we call "bunched R", but its bundle of features are hard to separate too. Maybe harder. I might be able to try to isolate the RTR by pronouncing /l/ and /r/ repeatedly in alternation and seeing if I can factor it out, so to speak. I'll give it a shot.

[Ċeaddawīc]

I've always had no idea about my coda /l/s. It seems to be that there is usually no contact of the tongue and the mouth, and no movement of the tongue. It seems very vowel-like...

Maybe it's a lowered velar lateral...

[Grimalkin]

If it sounds vocalic, it could be a back vowel such as or [o]. Recordings plox?

[Travis B.]

Emphatics seem like they should be easy for most English speakers, because most English speakers have [5].

[5], but not /l/ vs. /5/. So maybe not.

Agreed. Worse, since many of us don't even have true [l] as a phone, there's nothing to compare our "dark L" with. So it's hard to mentally separate its two main features [+lateral] and [+RTR] as these are normally all one package together in my speech. It's true I also have another retracted tongue root consonant, the one we call "bunched R", but its bundle of features are hard to separate too. Maybe harder. I might be able to try to isolate the RTR by pronouncing /l/ and /r/ repeatedly in alternation and seeing if I can factor it out, so to speak. I'll give it a shot.

Most definitely true. For instance, while I personally pronounce [l] with ease, [l] simply is not a native phone for me - at all. Hearing it used in English is honestly something I associate specifically with foreign accents. When I do hear it used in a non-foreign accent, I only associate it with the most stuffily conservative and artificially careful speech, but then I do not hear it used in that fashion often.

[Nortaneous]

Really? I associate [l] with a speech problem, and not conservative douchebaggery. And there are a lot of things that I associate with conservative douchebaggery.

[finlay]

I associate it with the Irish, or the French.

[Ċeaddawīc]

Okay, here's a recording of my basic, syllabic /l/ found in words like "bull" and "table."

I'm not quite sure exactly of it's normal, un-though-about, in-casual-speech form, so I did a couple of possibilities.

The first is a sound with an alveolar contact, which I'm pretty sure I don't have. The second is the more likely of the three, and it has no contact in my mouth that I can feel. The third is quite vocalic, and it's more like an over-emphasized dialectal syllabic /l/.

EDIT: What file extensions are allowed? I can't figure out how to upload it.

[finlay]

zip