Pronunciation is a mechanical process. All spoken language is produced by mouths, and all mouths are more or less the same. Therefore,mechanically at least, we are capable of producing native-sounding speech in any language. Unfortunately, the patterns of our speech are mightily habitual, so most of us sound funny speaking a second tongue. Fortunately, things can improve.
There's a reason French-accented English is different from German-accented English. The habits we learnspeaking our native tongue make us pronounce foreign words in predictably wrong ways. Here are some commonly confused phonemes that I've observed, grouped by nationality.
This wiki article on Non-native pronunciations of English has lots of good information. Hopefully they have your country.
/tʃ/ and /dʒ/
- /ʤ/ and /
- As in jaw and your
- [ z]
- This link provides a a pretty comprehensive list of minimal pairs that are hard for Russians.
- Russian also frequenly unvoice the consonants terminating words, saying things like "hef" instead of "have".
- Don't Call that Wizard Garry Potter
- Key value is not K value