I'm learning German, and only found out last weekend that the reason Germans pronounce W's as V is because they don't hear the difference. I was trying to get my (German) gf to explain why some words start with a "V" sound and some with a "W" sound, and she couldn't tell the difference. It's all the same sound to them. I now know how to pronounce German W's properly (the sound exactly halfway between W and V). Of course, they pronounce V like F, so I still have to get used to that ;)
Well, the English "V" is nearly identical to German "W"; the German "V" is nearly identical to English and German "F" and the English "W" doesn't quite exist in German. Someone had to point out to me as well that I was mispronouncing "water" as "vater" instead of "uuater" about ten years after I was somewhat fluent in the language. I never heard the difference before and native English speakers typically don't go around correcting the pronunciation of strangers….
It's probably English that's the outlier here, though. 'W' is a double-V in other European languages, only in English is it called a double-U, and treated like a vowel.
It isn't used like a vowel. There's no word 'XwY' for any string of letters X,Y - and you can't prounounce 'xwy' (for any single letters x,y) without adding vowel sound.
> There's no word 'XwY' for any string of letters X,Y
Awe, ewe, owe, awl, owl, own, two...
But my point was that in all other European languages, the letter 'W' is clearly a consonant, usually realized as [v] or [ʋ], and seen as a variant of 'V'.
English is the odd one out, English sees it as a variant of 'U', and it's not clearly a consonant, it's a semi-vowel as you pointed out further down.
Hindi (which I'm learning) is similar - व (usually transliterated 'va') is somewhere between an English 'w' & 'v' - not as much 'lip vibration' as the latter but more than the former.
It varies across the v <-> w spectrum depending on region, and also some words seem mostly nearer one or the other (but it's the same character, there isn't a second).
You sometimes hear that in native speaker's English, but more 'v's sounding nearer a 'w' than the other way around (as in native German speakers).
Fascinating how growing up with different languages teach us different sounds, and those we didn't use can be so difficult to produce, even if we can hear and understand the difference.
I struggle with two things in Hindi: aspiration (transliterated as 'ta' vs 'tha' for example, but that's not an English 'th', it's 'ta' with air forced out) which I usually either don't pronounce clearly, or it's way over-exaggerated; and retroflex consonants, which I can hear but often struggle to pronounce correctly quickly enough to flow with the rest of the word. And particularly 'd.a' which when correctly pronounced contains (to my ear) some 'r'.
The German "ch" sound is the thing I struggle with. Not a hard "ch" as in "church", but a soft sound like "shhh" (but in the back of the throat). Pretty hard for an English speaker to do, especially straight after/before rolling an "R"
