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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

It’s true. English and the main Spain version of Spanish are two of the few languages in the world which have the sound. Even most Latin American versions of Spanish (maybe all?) do not have it.

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Can you give an example of a common Spanish word that has it?

cien

In "distinción" spanish, the classic pair is the word for house and for hunt - "casa" and "caza" respectively. If you pronounce them the same (with an S sound), you're a Seseo speaker like (most) latin america. If you pronounce them with different sounds, one an S sound, the other a TH sound, you're a "distinción" speaker, and if you pronounce them both with a TH sound, it's the more uncommon ceceo accent, usually largely Andalusian.

My favourite word to troll people who are learning the language is "cerrojo" /θe'roxo/, meaning "latch" or "lock", as it contains the three most difficult consonants in the language in sequence xD

In Polish there is 'szczoteczka', which took me just about forever to learn how to pronounce. I just could not hear what I was doing wrong.

Same word in Russian is "щёточка". The lengths to which Poles are willing to go instead of just using Cyrillic will never stop to amuse me :D

I struggled quite a bit with "существительное" when learning Russian.

I was talking about spelling. I can clearly see how these clusters of consonants characteristic of all Slavic languages can be a pain for a beginner, no matter how you spell them.

No Cyrillic imports, thank you. Russia decided to be the bully and murderer of its closest neighbors, don't need any more russian influence, even if literally just on paper. The further one is from them the more safety and prosperity there is, in every possible way.

Dude, this is a linguistics thread. Ukrainian also uses Cyrillic, btw

And Cyrillic is, if anything, Bulgarian originally.

With Polish it may be even harder to go backwards, look for a clip from "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" movie on Youtube.

What I found helpful in parsing those z combinations is just replacing them with h instead. for example, if you went up to a random monolingual English speaker and showed them "shchotechka" they could probably pronounce it reasonably well. All those z's just throw people off.

Since we're piling on with hard to say words: Danes love to ask people to say "rødgrød med fløde".

https://translate.google.com/?sl=da&tl=en&text=rødgrød%20med...

(click the speak icon)

Any c+e/i (cena, cine) or z+a/o/u (zarza, zorro, zurrar) is a good heuristic.

c+a/o/u sounds like k (casa, cosa, cuchara) and z+e/i does not exist.

Z+e/i does exist, but it is not very common. A few examples:

- Words that are only written with Z: zepelín, zigurat, zigzag.

- Words that can be written with either Z or C: zénit, zinc, zirconio, azimut.

I stand corrected. All of those seem loanwords, but you are absolutely right.

My main point is that if you hear the sounds "th" (za) with e or i 99% it is cena or circo and will not be zena or zirco. It is an heuristic but very reliable.

P.S. Or pececín, as a random example :P

You are right, and yes, my nickname is an intentional misspelling from the old cybercafe days when I was a silly teenager trying to look cool xD

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