Quote Originally Posted by Maciamo
Yes, among Westerners it's mostly native-speakers of Germanic languages, and especially English, that have problems with the Japanese pronuciation. All Latin languages, Finnish, Greek, etc speakers have all the Japanese sounds in their language (except the "h" for Latins, but that they can replace by a soft "f").
I'm quite sure that the Japanese /u/ doesn't exist in Finnish as well as the /r/. I had to pay serious attention to the Japanese /r/ because it's so different - we roll our r's much more And the pronunciation of /u/ in Japanese is much closer to the Swedish /u/, so I don't think it exists in Finnish... But I could be wrong, though!