Nick Maclaren wrote:
[...]
As I said, French is very hard for many/most Germanic speakers,
because it depends on acoustic features that are essentially
unused in those languages.

You may not know that the recognition of basic 'objects' (i.e.
shape, pattern and colour for sight, and sounds as in vowels,
consonants, animal noises etc.) is largely genetic and developed
before birth for sight (and is common to almost all humans), but
is learnt after birth for sounds (and is NOT common to all people).
But it is so.

In particular, if you have not learnt to hear certain sounds by
the age of 5 or so, you probably never will - even if you have
an early hearing problem that is later corrected.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Many people have a better talent for
mimicry _and_ picking out sounds than they necessarily recognise. I'd
never discourage an adult learner on those grounds. Among commoner
European languages, I absolutely agree that French is the toughie. But
it can be done. French vowels are a bloody sight easier than Polish
consonants!

I started French only medium-early, at nine, under a retired colonel
whose Hindi-Urdu was pretty shit-hot as far as we could judge, but whose
Latin accent was totally un-Romance, and whose French accent fell a long
way short, as I later discovered when I moved on to better-qualified
teachers at thirteen. But when I gained fluency as a young man,
non-French people thought I was French, and the French couldn't quite
place me, usually plumping for Belgian: that's a perfectly achievable
and honorable target.

--
Mike.