to learn all major pronunciations in the world?

[zozzen]

My friends in Tibet told me that it's fashionable for some parents to take their children to learn Tibetan, because this language covers relatively more major vowels and sounds than any other languages. By that theory they believe a child with Tibetan language skills can speak, in spite of grammar issues, other languages faster.

I don't have knowledge to judge this, but I think it'd be great for a child to acquire the skills to speak major vowels, consonants, and sounds. Did anyone know any experiment on this? Are there any similar project around the world?

Take a look on this, the IPA handbook seems to cover these things, although there's no systematic way to teach them all to a child.

http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook/IPAhandbook.zip

[Hofmann]

Really?

Anyway, I don't think such a plan would be very effective. I'd rather have children grow up speaking whatever, and then walk them through the tables here when they're older.

[atitarev]

My own and my friends' observation was that Arabs are very capable of learning languages, both pronunciation and grammar. They have quite a list of consonants and the internal changes of words are very radical and use a big number of patterns. They do mix b and p, f and v, though, . (No barking here!). Standard Arabic doesn't have v and p letters. They mix not because of their phonological problems but because "v" is transliterated as "f" and "p" as "b" in Arabic.

An average student from the Middle East learned to speak in fluent Russian in less than a year - among them many of my former associates. There is little in common between Russian and Arabic but both have complicated grammar. I am sorry to say but Chinese and Koreans struggled even by the end of their 5 year course. However, take into account that they Chinese and Koreans didn't mix too much with us.