>>3900922Yes, but in Japanese case it's a matter of not just phonology (the discrete sound units a language uses) but also phonotactics (the way words are put together). I'm SFL and currently studying Japanese, so I'll use all three languages and a couple more as a frame of reference.
The main problem you find with English-to-Japanese isn't just the sound system but the fact Japanese phonotactics are very, very simple. The Japanese sound system isn't all that small, but their syllable structure is canonically V and CV (V=Vowel, C=Consonant) with the major exceptions being the medial -y-, the final -n, the lengthening of consonants between vowels, and the lengthening of vowels. So to give you an example, the word "stress" in Japanese would be transliterated as "sotoressu" because Japanese does not allow for consonant clusters; on the other hand Spanish, which is genetically related to English and has retained plenty of the same rules from Proto-Indo-European, would transliterate it as "estrés" because while it allows for the /str/ cluster and final /s/, it doesn't allow for /s/ clusters at the start of words or long consonants.
But you also have to take into account that transliterating loan words also isn't a since and it's subject to cultural and historical customs. For example, the modern word for Christian in Japanese is "kurisutyan"; but if you ever learn a bit about the Sengoku period you'll find that there used to be people called the "kirisitan", Japanese Christians converted by Catholic missionaries when Westerners first arrived to Japan, who were eventually persecuted by the Shogunate. Obviously both are just renderings of the same word, but since then the customs have changed due to the larger exposure to English Japanese has gone through. You'll find for example that 'th' from English is rendered as /s/, but the exact same consonant in a Greek or Old Norse word will be rendered as /t/. At the same time Japanese has a specific way to write /v/ in loanwords, despite the fact Japanese people can't distinguish it from /b/. So when speaking English, Japanese people *already* have certain specific habits that are unique to Japanese when speaking English loanwords.
There's also the fact that while they might not just be used to distinguish certain sounds. This isn't just a matter of pronouncing ability, but hearing ability as well. To give you a concrete example, you can check Coco's recent Spanish duolingo streams, and you'll notice that she will constantly confuse /l/, /r/ and /r:/. Coco is obviously capable of distinguishing between /l/ and /r/, and although Spanish /r/ and /r:/ aren't the same as in English, Japanese can articulate both of them separately on command. But Coco isn't used to *hearing* these three specific consonants being different from each other, even though she can pronounce them and she can distinguish between English /l/ and /r/.
