1. A method for training acoustic models for a target language comprising the steps of: a) providing a phonetic table of a reference, which characterizes the phones used in one or more reference languages with respect to their articulatory properties; b) providing a phonetic table of a target language, which characterizes the phones used in the target language with respect to their articulatory properties; c) providing a set of trained monophones for each reference language; d) providing a database of utterances in the target language and phonetic transcription of the utterances in the database; and e) processing using table correspondence processing methods and phonetic model seeding.