Nick Maclaren wrote:
I know a lot of people who find the converse is true - the difficulty
of Polish consonants is usually overstated.

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.

What is interesting is that I can repeat Chinese words perfectly well
because the French sounds already have 'en', 'on', 'ai', 'eu' and I
sometime wonder if I could learn it. The idea of a new alphabet,
culture etc. is attracting. However, I cannot do German.