Problems In English Pronunciation

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of our own language are so strong that they are very difficult to break. In our own language we have a fairly small number of sound-units which we put together in many differet combinations to form the words and sentences we use every day. And as we get older we are dominated by this small number of units. It is as if we had in our heads a certain fixed number of boxes for sounds; when we listen to our own language we hear the sounds and we put each into the right box,and when we speak we go to the boxes and take out the sounds we want in the order we want them. And as we do this over the years the boxes get stronger and stronger until everything we hear ,whether it is our own language or another,has to be put into one of these boxes, and everything we say comes out of one of them. But every language has different number of boxes,and the boxes are arranged differently. For example, three of the English boxes contain the sounds at the beginning of the words fin,thin and sin, that is, f,th and s.
It can be represented like this:

f / th / s



Now ,many other languages have boxes which are similar to the english ones for f and s but they do not have the special box for the th sound .When the foreign listener hears the English th sound he has to put it in one of his own boxes,his habits force him to do so, and he has no special th box, so he puts it into either the f box or the s box. In other words ,he hears the th



sound as either f or s;a funny f or a funny s, no doubt,but he has nowhere else to put it. And speaking the same thing happens : if he has to say thin,he has no th box to go to so he goes to the nearest box availuble to him,either the f or the s, and he says either fin or sin( or it may be tin,if he has a t box in his language).
This may sound easy but it isn’t. Unfortunately,it is nev...