I know our brains are trained in a certain way from childhood, but could someone elaborate? It seems physically impossible yet it is very much possible
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Part of it is that some sounds are literally more difficult than others. We know this because children develop the ability to produce some sounds before others, even if their ears and brains are properly distinguishing all the sounds they need. However, it’s that last thing that really makes the difference. Most of the time that you struggle to produce a sound, it’s not because it’s physically particularly difficult, it’s because you weren’t exposed to it during the period that you were able to pick up sounds easily.
Before 6 months of age, babies can distinguish all sounds that are meaningfully different in all languages. After that period, more or less, their brains start streamlining. After all, processing that much information takes energy, and so it starts ignoring distinctions it doesn’t need to pay attention to. For instance, in English, [p] and [pʰ] are in complementary distribution, so you don’t need to hear one from the other. But if you grow up speaking Mandarin, this distinction will be natural for you to hear and produce.
Personally, I find acquiring new sounds fairly easy, but this is because I have a good intuitive and explicit understanding of how the vocal tract is organized and can be shaped to produce sounds. It’s a skill one can develop with practice and learning. But it doesn’t compare to infants. Infants are language-learning machines
From what I remember about language acquisition, at birth humans can produce ~200 phonemes (sounds). But over the course of learning our language, certain sounds not used by our language fall to the wayside, and we become unable to make certain sounds. So if English is your first language, even with great effort, there are certain foreign sounds that your tongue will be unable to make.
A few reasons:
There are a wide variety of different sounds humans could potentially make with their mouths. No language uses all of them. Learning to use the ones not used in your first language is challenging.
There are often sounds that aren’t used in combination in one language but are in another.
Many languages may use the same alphabet you’ve learned but the letters don’t always correspond to the same sounds. This adds extra confusion, even if you wouldn’t have had trouble learning the pronounciation of the word by ear.
You’re simply out of practice. If your native language doesn’t have certain sounds, then you’re not experienced at producing those sounds.
The German words Kirche and Kirsche have different pronunciations. I know what those sounds are, I can recognise the difference, but I can’t say Kirche properly without immense effort, I always just pronounce both like Kirsche.
Like anything you do, it’s just a matter of experience. Enough exposure and practice, and you’ll be able to pronounce anything properly.
It’s an unfamiliarity with moving your mouth and tongue and whatnot in a specific configuration. It is something you can practice, just as you can practice stretching to become more flexible.
Like, my first language is English, but as a small child my dad taught me the ü sound (it’s different than a plain u, more like an “uerh”) for fun. My tongue is in a subtly different spot when I pronounce “u” vs. “ü” and I only got there with practice.
Most languages only include a subset of the sounds a human mouth can make and are used as building blocks of languages around the world. If your native tongue doesn’t make a sound that another language uses, it will require you to learn to make that sound. If your language doesn’t differentiate between multiple sounds, while another language does, you’ll probably end up pronouncing those sounds wrong.
Languages also have sort of unwritten rules about how sounds can be combined. An English speaker might look at Polish and not understand how to link so many consonants together, or at Hawaiian with its vowels. You’re likely to enforce your language’s unwritten rules on what sounds go together, or what sounds get stressed in a word on another language with different rules.
There’s a window for development of the language centers of our brain that closes in early adolescence. During that window, kids are sponges to soak up new words, sounds, etc. After that window closes, we can learn languages in an intellectual way, but learning new or different sounds will be difficult, where children do it unconsciously. My daughter went to Spanish immersion pre-school and was near fluent in Spanish without cracking a book, and her pronunciation was better than I could do with lots of effort.
To my knowledge, this is a late addition to the human brain in evolutionary terms, and the language window is unique among skills. For example, if you want to be a great tennis player, it’s good to start early, but there’s no similar time frame where if you haven’t learned how to hit a backspin drop shot by 14 you’re never going to learn.
Other languages have different rules for how combinations of vowels and consonants should sound together than the rule set of the language you grew up with.
The building blocks of words are sounds, and each language uses just a small selection of the possible sounds available. When you hear a sound that is different from those sounds, your brain tries to shoehorn it into whatever sound in your language is closest to it, because that is what makes sense to your brain (hearing is so imprecise that even when a sound is pronounced correctly it might arrive distorted and your brain tries to correct the distortion). But foreign words use foreign soundsets, and a sound that you think counts as a particular sound in your language you will tend to pronounce as the sound in your own language, even though the actual foreign sound is different.
As u/0rangy put it.. at birth we can produce more sounds but as we develop language we lose this because they are simply unnecessary.
You want to see proof of it in action? Find children who grew up bilingual since birth and see how they speak the multiple languages they know.
My Ex is Chinese and despite speaking English for over 20 years still has a very clear “Chinese” accent. It doesn’t lake long for anyone speaking with her to realize she’s not a native English speaker.. In fact you can quickly guess what her “native” language is because of how she pronounces certain sounds. No amount of “practice” seems to be able to overcome this as an adult.
The kids are bilingual and when they speak English or Mandarin you would be hard pressed to tell they speak another language.
Once at the Beijing airport my young daughter was bored and shy talking to me in English while a young boy played near by. I encouraged her to play with the young boy and the mother heard us talking and asked the boy to come over.
My daughter then switched to mandarin to speak with the boy and the mother was SHOCKED because while she was speaking English it was unclear she spoke mandarin at all. The woman told me that not only is her mandarin perfect, she can even tell me what province she is from as she has an accent from that area. The real kicker is they grew up in North America, they got the accent from their mother.
The brains of children are simply amazing..
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