Japanese, on the other hand, has very strict rules about what is and isn't a language sound. The total number of one-syllable building blocks out of which any Japanese word can be constructed is - wait for it - about 110. That's right. While we can only guess at the total inventory of English language sounds, in Japanese it is so low that we can simply count them up.

This is a good thing for us English-speaking oral acrobats. It's good because phonetically simple languages seem easier to learn. But it's challenging at the same time because it means that, out of sheer habit, we're probably going to be making all kinds of strange sounds unintentionally when we speak Japanese, and it can be hard to weed those out. Have you ever heard a foreigner speaking English and making sounds that are, at best, creative approximations of the true English sounds? In the beginning, we'll be doing a lot of that in Japanese. But think of it this way, you're in a much better spot than the poor Japanese guy learning English, trying to wrap his mouth around 7890 new language sounds!