In terms of sound and spelling, a certain way of spelling a word in a way dictates the type of sound that the spelling generates. In a broader sense though, the way something is spelled might not be the exact way that it sounds compared to the way it is expected to sounds, especially when you mix in the influence of culture and language differences. In many languages as it is with English, spelling can usually be used to help pronounce a word, but there are always a set of words that sound very different from what a non-speaker might expect it to sound when learning a language. In many cases,
One of the differences that make it difficult for a Nepali speaker to start learning English is the way that sentences are structured. For example, in English there is usually a Subject-Verb-Object structure; "Molly gave John the cookies". In comparison, Nepali is typically structured in Subject-Object-Verb manner, which would make it sound like "Molly to John the cookies gave", which to a person that speaks English sounds wrong.
Some sounds that I can't really think of that exist in Nepali but not English is the "kha" sound. The closest one that I can think of in English is "Khaki" but that doesn't really emphasize the "h" that exists in Nepali. This is a trend with a lot of the sound that "h" follows like "th" "cha" "gh","bh" etc. I don't exactly know how to describe the sound that "h" makes but it sounds more coarse or rough sounding in Nepali, whereas in English the h sound is more glanced over. Also, sometimes the "th" sound conversion might be pronounced as a "d" by a Nepali speaker.
The Nepali alphabet system, or Devanagari, has 33 consonants and 12 vowels in the language. There are no capital letters. Some consonant sounds can be a mix of other consonants combined or consonant+vowel combined.
One of the ways that I have been tackling the super similar sounding letters of the alphabet has just been listening to people talk and at times slowing down the speech if I am listening to a video or other form of speech. I've also been using my online resources and taking beginner Nepali courses that are offered to differentiate the differences.
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