Difficulty in a new language

[CorieHens]

In grade school, English was the medium of instruction in school so it is understandable that we had a difficult time in the first years of our schooling since Filipino is our native language. What gave us problems was the pronunciation of the TH, F, and the A syllables. Thought, fourth or forth, worth, those are difficult words to pronounce. The simple word data was taught to us as day-ta but in the later years we pronounced it dae-ta and again in the digital age it was back to day-ta.

In your second language, what difficulty have you encountered?

[kurdapia]

Our Filipino language is not as complicated as the others. We only have five basic sounds assigned to each of our vowels unlike the English and other languages they have several. A simple vowel can take a few forms or sounds like the short a long a and the schwa. Now learning another language would be quite a challenge for some us because of that issue I mentioned.

[lushlala]

I can't think of any specific sounds we struggled with, because I feel that my language lends itself very nicely to English. However, the complication most of us faced in state schools is that a lot of our English teachers didn't have the full grasp of the pronunciation of some English words. It's only when we grew up and started travelling, watching TV etc that we discovered that we were taught the wrong pronunciations. That of course, wasn't a problem for privately educated people!