Growing up we take for granted the features of our native language(s), and we’re very likely to encounter surprising complications when studying other languages. I’m not talking about certain features that are simply absent from the native language such as specific sounds, but rather different languages having different approaches to the same concepts.
For example, Russian has grammatical cases while caseless languages will use something else, prepositions most likely, instead. For this reason beginners will often just translate Russian words to English, losing case information in the process while failing to insert a preposition, ending up saying e. g. death star when they meant death of a star.
The same language reduces unstressed /o/ to /a/, which is something to be unlearned when studying just about any language, particularly Spanish where those vowels commonly differentiate the masculine and feminine genders.
Which features of your native language(s) do you find hard to unlearn when trying to master a different language?
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