A study in vowels: Comparing phonetic difficulties between languages

Abstract

Decade after decade language learning still proves difficult for EFL learners all around the world. Countries are consistently having the same phonetic problems they had. This article wants to present two methods commonly used when comparing languages (contrastive analysis and statistics) and add two more, relatively fresh methods (spectrographic analysis and Johari windows), in order to find a new angle to look at old problems. By taking into account more points of view, the resulting data could be a starting point for future researchers facilitating EFL learning for future generations.