parents can be mean

[Xavier_Onassis]

I was surprised she had difficulty with this, too.

For your information, Standard American Broadcast English has 39 different phonemes.
BBC Broadcast English has 44.  Some English speakers use as many as 49.

This is part of the reason why the 26 character Roman alphabet is inadequate to spell English, making it difficult to spell.

Standard Peninsular Spanish has 23 phonemes. Latin American Broadcast Spanish has 21.

No one who speaks Spanish has any serious spelling problems. You have to explain to them what a spelling bee is.

It is much harder for a Spanish speaking person to learn English than vice-versa, because English has more sounds, and many more consonant groupings.

[kimba1]

well
to be fair
she doesn`t speak spanish very well
it was pointed out when she was engaged to ben affleck ,the he speaks spanish much better than her.
spanish is not her primary language.

[Xavier_Onassis]

If you listen to JLo, you will see that she actually pronounces the words fairly well, but she has this dumb-blonde, I can't do it expression on her face. Many Americans have this "I know I can't do it, my mouth doesn't work that way" attitude, and will not TRY to pronounce the words. JLo tries, and almost gets it, then apologizes for not getting it right.

[Plane]

http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog240e.html

... examining this difference further, let's take a quick look at the experimentation that proved these results. The actual nerves that run from the human ear to the brain cross over, so that sound data from the right ear goes into the left brain, and vice versa. 

When different melodies are played at the same time into the right and left ears, which melody does the person hear? The person always recognizes the melody that he heard in his left ear better. This is how we know that the right brain, namely the left ear, is better at music.  Similarly, if different words are spoken simultaneously into the right and left ears, the right ear, namely the left brain, has better recognition.  That is way we almost always put the telephone receiver to our right ear.  There are other more complicated ways to test this, but this is the most fundamental experimentation method.

Using this method and many different types of sounds to find the difference between the left and right brains, it was shown that Japanese and Westerners alike heard music, machinery and noise sounds in the right brain and language sounds in the left brain, but Japanese heard vowels sounds, crying, laughing and sighing, the cries of insects and animals, waves, wind, rain, running water and Japanese musical instruments in the left brain, the same as language, while Westerners heard these sounds in the right brain together with music and noise.

Insect Sounds in America?
Speaking of insect sounds, I had the following experience. While driving through the mountains about two hours' inland from Boston far from human habitation, I came upon a beautiful spot, so I stopped the car to take a rest. I heard insects calling loudly even though it was broad daylight.

While I was listening to their sounds, I suddenly remembered that I never heard the sound of an insect while I lived in California for four years. Even in desert-dry California there is plenty of greenery along the coasts. But in my mind's eye, for some reason the woods that I can picture there were always completely silent. I couldn't ever remember hearing a noisy burst of crickets, or the insects that sing in the long nights of autumn.

What first comes to mind for Americans when they think of insects are mosquitoes, flies and bees, namely pest insects. There are still bees in America, but you hardly ever see flies or mosquitoes. That's why when you occasionally see a fly, you feel that you must be in a very unsanitary place. Where did these "enemies of civilized life" all disappear to?

Also, words that are used to define insects also tend to have bad connotations. The word "insect" when used about a person means "worm, good-for-nothing," while the word "bug" means '"annoy," and is also used to mean a software error, as in "programming bug." 

If all insects are pests, and all their songs are just heard as noise, then it wouldn't be strange to think that Americans have used the same poisons they used to eradicate the fly and mosquito to indiscriminately destroy all the other species.

The Culture to Be Heard in Insect Sounds   
In contrast, in Japan there is a whole culture to be heard in the sounds of insects. Even today there are websites devoted to images of crickets and recordings of their songs, and there are countless books about how best to keep them. The nursery rhyme "Insect Voices" is an example of how the art we hear in insect sounds is familiar to us from childhood.

Oh, the matsumushi cricket is singing
Chin-chiro, chin-chiro, chin-chiro-rin
Now the suzumushi bell-ring cricket is starting to sing
Rin rin rin rin ri-in rin
Calling out through the long autumn nights
Oh how beautiful are the insects' voices !

All the different kinds of insects like matsumushi and suzumushi sing with different kinds of chirps.   

We can imagine the Japanese view of nature that says both humans and insects as part of all living creatures have "voices" and "feelings." The unique characteristic of Japanese people that hears insect sound and human voices in the same language sphere of the brain is very well reflected in our culture.

Dogs Say "Wan-wan," Cats Say "Nya-nya"
Prof. Tsunoda's discovery also showed that besides insect sounds, Japanese also heard other animals' cries, plus the sound of waves, wind, rain and bubbling brooks in the language sphere. In Japanese, brooks say "sara-sara," waves say "zabu-n," rain says "shito-shito," and wind says "byu-byu-." Prof. Tsunoda's discovery is in line with the ancient Japanese view of nature that sees gods living in every natural being, from mountains to rivers and seas, with man being no more or less than one of these natural beings.   

The fact that this type of onomatopoeia is so highly developed is a special characteristic of the Japanese language. Maybe it is only natural for children who have been taught these onomatopoeia words from the beginning to learn to process all nature's sounds including insects and animals as language. Or, did these onomatopoeia developed so richly precisely because we started out processing natural sounds in the language sphere?   

Either way, the physiological characteristic of Japanese to hear natural sounds in the language sphere of the brain, and the linguistic characteristics of the Japanese language which has highly developed onomatopoeia, together with the Japanese view of nature which finds gods residing in all natural beings, are all very well represented within the Japanese psyche.

Not the Man but the Language
The significant part of Prof. Tsunoda's discovery is that the Japanese pattern of hearing nature sounds in the language sphere is not a matter of ancestry, but rather dependent on whether Japanese was the first language learned.

Data collected from 10 South Americans of Japanese ancestry shows ....