I’m a fluent English speaker (as a second language – my native language is Turkish) and currently brushing up on my German, which I had taken as a second foreign language back at high school. Once I become more conversational in German, I’d like to learn one more language but haven’t decided which one yet. In this thread I want to focus specifically on the pronunciation aspect. Which European language has the “least problematic” pronunciation for a student of that language, in your view?
By “problematic” I’m talking about “hard to pronounce sounds” like in the following languages:
Portuguese (the ão sound like in São Paulo)
Dutch (the throaty g sound that’s more like an h)
German (it’s not that big of a deal actually, but the ch sound is a bit tricky – it’s neither like sh nor like an h)
Spanish (not even sure if it’s a Spain vs Latin America thing, but there is a th sound in there somewhere that makes it hard to say cerveza without accidentally spitting in someone’s face)
Are there any easy peasy languages, from a pronunciation standpoint, that don’t have any “weird” sounds like in the above examples?