Ken Koester wrote: > Made even worse by the fact that most people lose the ability to hear > differences between vowel tones they are accustomed to & foreign ones by > the time they are 12. That's why few adults learn to speak another > language with the correct accent or at least, accent-free, and why it is > much much easier to learn languages when you are a young kid. The cool thing about this is that apparently infants have all the neural structures needed for the acquisition of any human language. After about age three or so, though, unused structures atrophy and disappear while used structures are strengthened and elaborated. So when my (Chinese) wife pronounces "towel" as "tower" it's because she really doesn't have the ability to pronounce that final consonant. (Which I find also fascinating, since the "l" sound is common in Mandarin, just never as a final consonant.) -- Frank Mayhar frank at exit.com http://www.exit.com/ Exit Consulting http://www.gpsclock.com/ http://www.exit.com/blog/frank/