Different vowel sounds

[leosmith]

Can you tell me, in pinyin, in the order of difficulty, which vowel sounds are the most different from english. What I'm thinking of are the vowels that make you do strange and unusual things with your mouth and tongue. If you a specific vowel sound is worse under a specific tone, I'd love to hear your opinion on that too.

[semantic nuance]

I don't know the order of difficulty of Chinese vowels. But, from my experience chatting with those foreign friends learning Chinese, the sound of 魚 (yu) is worst pronounced. As for the other vowels, I think they're similar to English--a i u e o, etc.

Hope it helps!

[Lugubert]

It's difficult for me to answer from a purely English point of view, but I suppose quite a few of us have to work on the 'i' varieties in words like 是 or 四. One possibility for the 'e' in 喝, perhaps even the most common one, is a back vowel that is internationally very rare indeed.

[L-F-J]

I've heard "si" pronounced very poorly in counting 1 2 3 4 by people who don't learn Chinese. It seems pretty easy for those who are actually learning Chinese and give attention to pronunciation.

One thing I've heard that is even difficult for some people who study for a long time is the words with umlauts. That's the two little dots over the words. In pinyin it's sometimes written with a V instead of U. For example in: "nv ren", a woman.