this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
13 points (84.2% liked)

Language Learning

929 readers
38 users here now

A community all about learning languages!

Ask / talk about a specific language or language learning in general.

Sopuli's instance rules apply

  1. Remember the human! (no harassment, threats, etc.)
  2. No racism or other discrimination
  3. No Nazis, QAnon or similar whackos and no endorsement of them
  4. No porn
  5. No ads or spam
  6. No content against Finnish law

Other active Lemmy language communities:

Other communities outside Lemmy:


Community banner & icon credits:

Icon: The book cover of Babel (2022 novel by R. F. Kuang)

Banner: Epic of Gilgamesh tablet (© The Trustees of the British Museum)


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I know that for example, Japanese has words starting or ending with りゃく, りょう or りゅう which is difficult for English speakers to pronounce when they are learning the language. There are words such as 遠慮 (えんりょ), 留学生 (りゅうがくせい) or 略奪 (りゃくだつ) to mention a few, even Japanese names that have those sounds (i.e. 久常涼 or ひさつね・りょ) but they often mispronounce them (り・よ / や / ゆ) which are separate sounds in Kana but clustered together from り (like り + よ becomes りょ).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SamuraiBeandog@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not rocket science, they're just sounds that don't get used in English.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 1 points 7 hours ago

Similar in a sense to Portuguese speakers trying to learn Japanese, I think: long vowels are rare in Portuguese and only happen in spoken language but as part of natural sound concatenation (or in poesy or music but then there'll be a hard time explaining the metrics), and hard cuts similar to っ's afaik were dropped from Portuguese some 50 years ago, so drawing comparison to those can be rather challenging.