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

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
Answered 2017-08-14 · Upvoted by

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

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