danielcg:What's the problem with "scias"? Don't you have that same combination of sounds in English? Really, one must see astonishing posts in these forums. (Hint: "one muST SEE AStonishing...")

Now you help me find an example of this combination of sounds in Spanish, will you?

Regards,

Daniel

ceigered:However, one great thing was the cutting of marginal sounds and combinations, now its 'savas' and not 'scias'.

Word finally, 'sts' e.g. in 'exists' is very easy for English speakers, I guess this must be because the stress in English is always at the front so we are used to consonant clusters at the end of words as we naturally reduce the ends or words anyway. Outside of this, the 'sts' sound is alien to English speakers (there exists a chance that there is a word starting with 'sts' in the dictionary, but no one would use it in everyday communication, and even less would bother pronouncing it phonetically).

But we English speakers learnt this as children, when our minds were very very open indeed.

Further, it is quite normal for 'must see' to be pronounced 'mussee', as if the 't' didn't exist. Same with 'land' and 'and' where the final 'd' can be cut off. When this happens though the consonant generally increases in length like double consonants like in Finnish and Italian. It's only in slow speech or formal speech that we pronounce those clusters properly, and like I said, its only because we've been learning since birth ha ha. However I can only speak for my own dialect, Australian English.

I think in Spanish the only example I could find would be the tú form of 'existir' (existes) maybe if the speaker were cutting out their 'e's

I agree with Jan Aleksan on the note of Japanese. Speaking of which, there's some American show on TV and they've accidentally given a Japanese person a Chinese accent... Sad...