What sounds in your language do foreigners find hard to pronounce?

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2017-08-14 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

For Modern Greek, the following sounds are cross-linguistically rare, and certainly rare among European languages:

ɣ ~ ʝ: γάμος, γέρος
x ~ ç: χάμω, χελιδόνι
ɟ [the palatalised allophone of ɡ]: αγγίζω
ð, θ: δέντρο, θάμνος
r: ρέμα (people really don’t deal well with trills)
Initial clusters like ks, ps, vl, vr, ðr, ðj, ɣl, ɣr: ξέρω, ψέμα, βλέπω, βρίσκω, δράμα, διάνα, γλόμπος, γράμμα

Steve Rapaport, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.