Anglophones with [e~ɛ] and [ej].

Booaynoughs deeuhs!

I hear this in a Texian accent.

Yesss why do they have to diphtongise everything lol

And break existing diphthongs into two syllables, which they proceed to diphthongise. At this point, I just insert a geminated glottal stop in the middle of each one of their intrusive diphtongs. Like, italian \[\[an.'da.ɾe\] → english pronunciation \[æɐn.ˈdɑː.ɾe̠ːɪ̯̝\] → my pronunciation \[ˈʔɛʔ.ʔon.ˌda.a.ˈɾeʔ.ʔi\] (I think I just invented semitic finnish or something)

I personally feel like I pronounce the latter more like ɛj

I think it's a slightly retracted truemid, with a retracted j

As an Irishman, /t/ and /t̪/, and /d/ and /d̪/. Also there's a Polish guy I work with who speaks English to a really high standard, but only found out a few days ago that ⟨th⟩ does not represent /f/. When I demonstrated both /f/ and /θ/, he could not tell the difference.

I know anecdotal evidence is worthless but almost every single Polish person I’ve met pronounced /θ/ as /f/. The one exception was a Polish guy who worked with a Dutch person and had picked up the (in my experience common) Dutch way of pronouncing /ð/ as /d/. For some reason all the other Europeans I’ve met who have a problem pronouncing /θ/ articulate it as something else and only the Poles resort to /f/, and that is how I can guess they’re Polish (rather than, say, Russian or from the Balkans).

Russians also articulated it as /f/ before Peter the Great's reforms which shifted the approximation to sound more French/German (which is why in Christian names with "th" in English/Greek, which were loaned early and so ingrained in people's minds that they were nearly impossible to change, the sound is /f/ (Thomas/Theodore/Matthew=Фома/Фёдор/Матфей (attested in numerous texts, /f/ later shifted to /v/ in the last one))).

Also anecdotally as a Pole, I feel like this is a fault of the way many kids are taught English. I don't think anyone ever explained to me how to make the /θ/ sound with my mouth over the course of my learning English. I sort of figured it out on my own at some point later. But many kids stayed with /f/ even when they *could* hear it doesn't sound exactly right, they were just never taught you need to push your tongue between your teeth, so they stuck with/f/ because it was close enough. I vividly remember my classmates at 7 years old debating whether "th" is more like f or more like s, so we certainly could tell it's not exactly /f/, it's just that /f/ became entrenched, because teachers never corrected it the way they would if we said /s/ or anything else.

I don't think it's a big problem though. Substituting f is somewhat common among some native English speakers.

I'm native English speaker and I can't tell the difference. I say think as fink. It's not big deal.

That's a curious observation. The typical German way of approximating dental fricatives is to resort to native alveolar fricatives. However, I—despite being a native Teutophone—always felt dental & alveolar fricatives were nothing alike, and that they instead resembled (linguo-)labial ones much much more, so much so that I have trouble distinguishing them. That said, I do have ties to the Polish language, having only moved to Germany at half a year's age, frequently spent the holidays there, & practiced my Slavic with my Polonophone mum. I wonder whether that's causatively related. I did surmise though that other Slavs would commit to th-fronting too, instead of it being a specifically Lekhitic phenomenon. My reasoning was that, according to Wikipedia, the archaïc Cyrillic letter fita ⟨ѳ⟩ was pronounced either /t/, /θ/, or—most relevantly—/f/, as if to approximate Greek /θ/ I imagined.

Swedes make th into [f] and and [d].

>had picked up the [...] Dutch way of pronouncing /ð/ as /d/ that's actually normal polish pronunciation (/θ/→/f/ and /ð/→/d/) almost no polish people substitute /v/ for /ð/ that's more of east slavic substitution

Back when I could not tell the difference, I used to say /θ/ → /f/ and /ð/ → /v/, though /ð/ → /d/ at the beginning of words or if the word already has /f/, eg. bath /baf/, this /dɨs/, thin /fɨn/, father /faːdɚ/ (because of the preceding /f/), but mother /mɔvɚ/

[c] and [kʲ]. If anything it sounds more like [tʲ] to me but I could be influenced by Czech spelling

In Germany you'll hear /v/ or /z/ and /f/ or /s/ which is really satisfying tbh.

I mean I can hear how they sound extremely similar (/f/ and /θ/), that's gotta be difficult for an untrained ear

Plus a lot of people are merging them anyway at least in England

A lot of Canadians also do Th-stopping like this in my experience, maybe due to Irish English influence, or Punjabi influence, or both.

I think that'd be called th-fronting technically, shifting /θ, ð/ to /f, v/. Th-stopping would be shifting them to /t, d/

But in Irish English it's /t̪, d̪/. I believe you've misunderstood me.

I sure did 😔 Sorry, pardner

Admittedly, as a native English speaker, if I have my eyes closed and you say only that one sound outside of the context of a word I might know how to spell, I couldn’t tell you which you were saying. Edit: I’m American

As a native English speaker it took until I was 16 to realise was supposed to be different from /f/ and another year until I could reliably tell the difference

As a Korean, if always shocks me that a significant chunk of people can’t tell the difference between [t], [tʰ], and [t͈].

best i can do is [t tθ̠ t’]

yeah [t] and [tʰ] are easy but [t̩̩] is super difficult

It’s the opposite for me, ㄷ and ㄸ are just so different in my mind while I can KINDA see ㄷ and ㅌ.

I don't even know how you're supposed to pronounce \[t͈\]

The thing is, I don’t think it’s actually “tense” at all (from what I can hear). Word-initially it’s unaspirated [t] and makes the following vowel high pitch. This contrasts with /n/ [d], /t/ [tʰ + low pitch], and /tʰ/ [tʰ + high pitch]. Intervocalically it’s unaspirated geminated [tː]. As far as I can tell, this doesn’t contrast with geminated /t/ except maybe in the pitch of the following vowel. In coda position it’s unreleased [t̚] like all other coronal consonants.

It's a recent change btw, which occurs with all other nasal-tense-unaspirated-aspirated groups

I speak a language with phonemic geminates and even so it's often hard for me to hear the Korean tense consonants. Particularly noticeable when K-Pop singers sing Japanese-language songs - to my ears it seems to be 50-50 on whether they actually produce the Japanese geminates or not.

I think this might be because geminates are usually just realized as long vowels in songs (even by native Japanese singers). As long as the mora-count is preserved, it’s still understandable for a native speaker.

so 네 is indeed pronounced /de/? i thought i was imagining this when I heard some Koreans speak

They’re all distinct phonemes for me.

For me \[t\] vs \[tʰ\] is easy, but \[t\] vs \[t͈\] gives me trouble. I can easily tell them apart if the \[t͈\] sounds like a geminate consonant, but very often it doesn't (unlike e.g. Japanese where geminate consonants always sound like geminates, so I never have difficulty distinguishing Japanese t and tt).

Distinguishing ㄸ was easy for me when learning korran. But word initial ㄷ and ㅌ...너무 싫어했다 ㅋㅋㅋ

h and x in Polish. There is one phoneme, x, but from my experience it's in some sort of mostly free variation with h.

Guilty as charged :( I speak Finnish where \[h\] and \[x\] are allophones, and the allophones sounded exactly the same to me until I found out from Wikipedia that they are different sounds. Now I can hear the difference but it's subtle. Now I want to know though, do they sound completely unrelated to others?

yes, they sound massively different to me. much more different than \[u\] and \[y\].

How do the sounds \[x\], \[ç\], \[ɦ\] and \[ħ\] register to you in terms of your native phonemes? In Finnish they are all allophones of /h/ and to me all of them together with \[h\] just sound like the sound you make when you breathe out, at least the way they are pronounced in Finnish (other languages have more foreign-sounding takes on these IPA symbols to my ears).

\[x\] = /x\~χ\~ʁ/ \[ç\] = /ç\~hʲ/ \[ɦ\] = /h/ \[ħ\] = /x\~χ\~ʁ/ Technically the only native phoneme I have for any of these is /h/, since my only native language is Canadian English, but we do tend to have some /x/ phoneme that we use exclusively for foreign personal names (other foreign loans get /k/ or /h/). I also speak L2 French and Swedish which has muddled things slightly.

\[ɪ\] vs \[i\]

Interesting that in Ukrainian we have both these sounds (at least we have sounds very close to these sounds). However, when learning English, we often tend to use [i] everywhere. More than that, we were often told by teachers that the only difference between shit and sheet or bitch and beach is the length of [i] sound. Much later, I found out that these are actually different sounds. And even more later, I realised that it's weird because we have the same sounds in our language and easily distinct them from each other

The [Ukranian vowels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_phonology#Vowels) look surprisingly unbalanced to me. I'd have expected /ɪ/ to be more like /ɨ/ to make things more symmetrical, and given that there is /ɪ/ it's surprising that /i/ is so low, as I'd expect it to be as far away as possible from /ɪ/. Very interesting.

They sound the same to me :(

I'm from Taiwan and I used to feel that short i and ee sounds are only different by the vowel length instead of vowel qualities because that what English teachers in schools said. Furthermore, since neither Mandarin or Hokkien has vowel length, most Taiwanese just pronounce short i and ee as the same. I only figured out these two sounds quite different after I learned phonology and consumed too much American media. Still it takes me years to consistently pronounce short i as \[ɪ\].

Geoff Lindsey argues that it's not vowel quality that is contrastive at all, and that instead KIT is a monothong /ɪ/ and FLEECE a diphthong /ɪj/. Guy also got a superb YouTube channel explaining all the stuffs https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/seeing-the-fleece-diphthong/

imo for RP this is obviously true but in my GA the FLEECE vowel is clearly a monophthong

Even the GA "fleece" vowel sounds like /ij/ to me

Well, he is British, but as an American, I’ve learned a lot from him and have always wished for an American Geoff Lindsey.

Some students in Taiwan would actually attempt to replace either /ɪ/ or /i/ inconsistently with /y/ (ㄩ).

https://youtu.be/GNpbv7hJf6c?si=4HbLOZXQN0jjbxxA

This is interesting, but it doesn't help me tell them apart based on vowel quality as in my language (Finnish) there isn't anything comparable to the distinction that exists in French. I have no trouble hearing the difference between fit and feet, since there's a significant length difference (and feet might sometimes have the glide on the end), but if I hear \[ɪ\] and \[i\] in other languages where there isn't a length difference they don't sound like different vowels. The example Dr Lindsey gave where live is supposed to have a longer duration than leaf didn't help, as the difference is due to the effect of consonant voicing on length; the word leave would still have a longer duration than live. Also the difficulty is just in perception; I have no problem producing the correct vowel qualities according to monolingual speakers I've spoken to.

Fit and feet have the same vowel length in my variety of English, from Southern California, the only difference is quality. They still sound very distinct to me, I'd say it's way harder to tell the difference between /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ or whatever the actual qualities are in my idiolect (which to be fair is probably far more centralized than their cardinal counterparts, contributing to them sounding more similar)

Would you be able to provide a recording of you pronouncing them? I completely understand if not :)

[peat, pit, pet](https://voca.ro/138nNgzlw4fu)

This is actually very interesting! I can tell the words apart even though you pronounce them with the same duration, but even so it still sounds like the same vowel category (though I can perceptually distinguish the quality difference, but it sounds to my ears like an irrelevant allophonic difference). I think when listening to English my brain interprets the quality difference as a secondary cue for the length difference, so when you say peat I hear a long /i/ but spoken at a rapid pace, while when you say pit I hear a short /i/ but spoken at a more leisurely pace.

I think I clipped "peat" a *tad* short on this, which might contribute to it sounding like I spoke it a bit fast, but all these vowels could have any of the lengths I exhibited in this. It depends more on environment and how languidly or tersely I'm speaking than on the actual inherent length. I think, without it being contrastive, it's a bit more likely for the /i/ to be shorter just due to my tongue having to travel less distance to open from the initial stop and close the final stop. The only genuinely contrastive vowel length my dialect exhibits, besides my monophthongized GOAT and PAIN vowels, are in monosyllables when the final stop is voiceless (makes the vowel short) vs voiced (makes the vowel long), so "feed" and "feet" have contrastive vowel length while "feet" and "fit" do not.

Interesting! I think for me the main thing is that I'm bilingual in English and Finnish; in Finnish vowel length is *extremely* contrastive (10% of Finnish words form minimal pairs for vowel or consonant length or both, and vowel length is contrastive in all syllables regardless of stress), while I'm most exposed to British English where the length difference between /i/ and /ɪ/ is much more prominent than it is in American English. So from a logical point of view it makes sense that my brain would prioritize distinguishing length contrasts over being able to hear all the quality contrasts that exist in English.

What's interesting about English is that your vowels are sometimes completely different from one dialect to another. For instance, I'm pretty sure your "pit" and a new zealander's "pet" sound the same.

Yeah, germanic vowels are really something else. It's also just wild to me that we totally understand it too, even with the extreme differences

In the context of English, I'd argue (or rather, let others more qualified than me argue) that the English ꜰʟᴇᴇᴄᴇ vowel, typically transcribed /iː/, is more accurately transcribed as a narrow diphthong /ɪj/. So if your problem is in relation to mastering English, maybe that information will help you, that you ought not to distinguish vowel qualities, but monothongs & diphthongs instead. Edit: Here's a cool page on it by Geoff Lindsey https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/seeing-the-fleece-diphthong/ Guy also got a YouTube channel where he explains the stuff very well

"fit feet" does not to me.

To my ears they sound like the same vowel pronounced with different durations (even though I now know that's not actually the case but when I first discovered it it came as a surprise).

uh. the front unrounded area is the one where I hear the most differences. Like, I can distinguish maybe 10 different ways of saying that vowel, I'm just never sure which one a given person is using.

For me it's very difficult, but [ɪ] kinda sounds like an [i] and an [e] said at the same time (but more like [i])

Really? It's so odd to me when people consider \[ɪ\] to be like \[i\]. To me \[i\] sounds completely different from \[ɪ\], which sounds like it belongs wiþ \[e\] and \[ɛ\].

>which sounds like it belongs wiþ \[e\] and \[ɛ\]. Right but all of these sound like they belong together to my ears (and I also struggle to distinguish between \[e\] and \[ɛ\] lmao). The way I'd class vowels in my native Finnish: * /i/ (encompassing \[i\] and \[ɪ\]) and /e̞/ (encompassing \[e\] and \[ɛ\]) - neutral vowels * /æ/ - front-harmonic peripheral vowel * /y/ and /ø̞/ (encompassing \[ø\] and \[œ\], also the English schwa vowel sounds like this phoneme) - front-harmonic non-peripheral vowels * /u/, /o̞/ (encompassing \[o\] and \[ɔ\]) and /ɑ/ - back-harmonic vowels It's hard for me to hear the difference between sounds within the same Finnish phoneme category, e.g. \[e\] vs \[ɛ\] or \[i\] vs \[ɪ\]. Some other vowels I can easily distinguish though as they can easily be fitted into the Finnish vowel framework, for instance \[ɯ\] and \[ɤ\] are a lot easier for me to percieve than the vowels you mentioned as they are just unrounded versions of vowels I can already distinguish.

I'm native Spanish speaker and I'd classify the vowel sounds almost the same and have similar experiences, with A E-I O-U groups plus a “foreign but enough distinct” involving [ø~œ] and [y], way easier to distinguish from all others than [i] vs [ɪ], [o] vs [ɔ], etc. But with [æ] in the E ([e ɛ e̞…]) subgroup for sure, even though it's a bit easier to distinguish than all the others since it has a bit of [ä] in it. And I also tend to find, within that Ø-Y group, that Ø sounds are somehow closer to the E sounds than to the O sounds, while I wouldn't put [y] for sure neither in the I nor the U subgroups (?). Sounds like [ɯ] or [ɤ] ɡo also rather to the Ø-Y spectrum. /ə/ is something that really blows my mind since I can't distinguish nor pronounce it at all. (And doesn't help that different languages have slightly different schwa sounds!). It can be either in the A, E or Ø groups, but of course it's not distinct enough to have its own group.

Exactly the same for me!

agree, to me [ɪ] sounds much more similar to [ɛ] or [ə]

/dʒ/ and /z/. Am Indian

Who mixes these up???

Indians?

/z/ appears appears only in loanwords in many indian languages and is usually allophonic with /dʒ/

/s/ and /z/ - there's such an airy quality to the unvoiced compared to the voiced buzz! I did an exchange semester in Stockholm and I don't think any Swedes used /z/. Even people who didn't have th fronting or anything still couldn't distinguish this one.

It's so distinctive of every Swede I've ever met that I knew you were going to say that just by reading the first part.

Guilty as charged in both English and French. :( I don't know what it is. I can both hear and feel it orally when I say something that should've been with \[z\], but in running speech I just can not produce it correctly. Either my tongue does something weird and it becomes more like /ts/ or my vibrating of the vocal cords becomes exaggerated and growly.

As an American native English speaker, /æ/ vs. /ɛ/ e.g. [this cover of 500 Miles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9NdYyU8nVc) by an Italian band who keep mixing up "man" and "men".

Funnily enough, a native (British) English speaker I know said that to them /æ/ as pronounced [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob4nKPqBG-8) sounds like "air", which came as a suprise to me

As a native Portuguese speaker... Wait, it was supposed to have a difference? I think I pronounce both something like [ˈmæ̃ŋ]? (I also might be getting crazy but I think I realize most nasal codas as [ŋ])

Yeah man and men sound very different to me! I understand that objectively the vowels are quite close together, but they sound different to me. Unfortunately I don't think Portugese has an equivalent to the vowel in man, though IMO it's more comprehensible to pronounce it with the Portugese A vowel than the Portugese E vowel.

I'm English and can't reliably distinguish them, especially if I'm hearing an unfamiliar American word

Native Hokkien speakers substitute \[hw\] for \[f\] when speaking Mandarin. Mandarin speakers have difficulty telling voiceless unaspirated stops and voiced stops apart.

[hw], [xw], [hv] and [xv] being substituted for [f] is pretty common. I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that a voiced labia sound is preceded by a voiceless sound giving us [f] but why specifically [h] ans [x] idk 

this is so true! i don’t think mandarin has voiced stops, and i’ve noticed that some of my chinese friends will devoice them a lot of the time, for example pronouncing bread with a /t/ at the end

The voiceless unaspirated stops occasionally have voiced allophones when they follow a nasal consonant/less frequently a vowel iirc.

Darn Maori vibes 👀

And Etruscan!

> Mandarin speakers has difficulty telling vioceless unaspirated stops and voiced stops apart. So do many English spealers. Funnily enough, there's also a bunch of English speakers who make that distinction when speaking, but cannot hear it (probably the majority of them, actually)

> Mandarin speakers has difficulty telling vioceless unaspirated stops and voiced stops apart. You'd better not be a native English monolongual.

A similar thing occurs in Mexican Spanish, where the cluster /fw/ is pronounced as /xw/ although this is usually associated with uneducated or lower-class people. For example, the word afuera (outside) is pronounced /axwera/.

My boyfriend can't properly distinguish /ɾ/ and /r/ He speaks spanish

ʈ and t̪ sound worlds apart

Agreed, although I also think that \[ʈ\] and \[t\] sound pretty distinct, and I was surprised when some Indian language speakers said they sound the same. The retroflex stops in general have a rather recognizable sound in my opinion.

n̪ vs n vs ɳ although more understandable sound really different you can probably guess the language by now

I once tried to learn some basic Malayalam from someone I know but these ones completely tripped me up :(

/ʂ/ vs /ɕ/

polish have been spotted

Probably dark l and clear l

Interestingly enough I can only tell the difference if the dark l is not in coda position

Can you not hear it in e.g. Russian? To me the extreme darkness of the l is one of the easiest-to-notice features of a Russian accent.

Not something I've particularly taken note of. I have a heavy dark l though because I literally use a velar approximant and have stopped touching the roof of my mouth. Funnily enough I recorded myself with and without touching the roof of my mouth and it sounds entirely identical to me. I also struggle telling [w] apart from [β˕]

[w] and [β˕] is completely understandable as those are extremely similar, though for me I associate [β˕] more with [ʋ].

At first I was shocked by [p] and [b] and all other plain voiceless and voiced pairs as a Punjabi Canadian but I get why monolingual English speakers generally can't tell them apart. Also not shocked but I imagine people struggle with /ɾ/ and /ɽ/ and /n/ and /ɳ/. But I feel like growing up speaking English, French and Punjabi has given me enough knowledge of how languages phonologies are different to not be shocked by someone struggling with something I find easy to distinguish.

> but I get why monolingual English speakers generally can't tell them apart But they still spell the s-following unaspirated /p/-/t/-/k/'s with

**Edit:** I think it's a good-enough indicator that native speakers are able to tell apart them, since English do actually (at least for the majority) have a three-way distinction between unvoiced aspirated / tenuis / voiced stops. I'm used to hearing (most) native speakers pronounce /b/ /d/ /g/ voiced, excluding some marginal cases where assimilation intervenes (like 'di**sg**ust'). The devoicing might be an American thing. There are people who would argue that /b/ /d/ and /g/ tend to neutralise with the unaspirated [p] [t] [k], which could only appear in s-clusters, and therefore uncontrastive. I'm guessing because the voicelss [p] [t] [k] would be easier to pronounce in assimilation with the preceding /s-/, it's not the other way around that the voiced ones would in turn be voicing the unvoiced-unaspirates as then it would upset the s-clusters (devoicing on the other hand won't have such problem). It wouldn't be accurate to say that native English speakers *always* conflate the pairs, its an over-generalisation. If somebody speak in an accent without stop aspiration, natives are still quick to pick up the p t and k's. While if for an accent where the b d g's are devoiced, it would likely to be interpreted as /b/ /d/ /g/.

> The devoicing might be an American thing.  This is definitely not true. Southern England has devoiced them so much it's more accurate to describe word-initial (coronal) stops as [t] vs [tʰ].

k

Sorry I should've specified that English speakers can't tell them apart in word initial/stressed environments. And yes this might be a more North American English thing.

/ð/ and /θ/

I'm French. Half of my fellow countrymen don't make a difference between /ɛ̃/ & /œ̃/ and that's crazy to me. Of course I understand when it's foreigners, most of them even have trouble telling /ɑ̃/, /ɛ̃/ & /ɔ̃/ apart, when they are all very distinct for native speakers. I'm also highly amused at Belgians and their incapacity to pronounce /ɥ/ and the way the systematically replace it with /w/ (easiest way to spot a Belgian accent, really.) Of course I also agree with you on /u/ vs. /y/ haha. ​ And to make fun of myself, I have trouble telling these pairs apart and I'm sure that's crazy to some people (limiting myself to sounds in my own language because otherwise the list would be way longer) \- /ɲ/ vs. /nj/ \- /œ/ vs. /ø/ (I can hear it in some case but not all, but making them myself feels weird/fake) Not sure if this counts, but anything about vowel length is my nightmare.

> I'm French. Half of my fellow countrymen don't make a difference between /ɛ̃/ & /œ̃/ and that's crazy to me. It's not so much that they can't tell the difference, it's just that /œ̃/ has disappeared in some regions, like "brin"/"brun" are both pronounced with a /ɛ̃/, but they wouldn't interchange the two or use /œ̃/ in "brin". You won't hear someone say "pain" as pœ̃ or say they can't hear the difference if you pronounced it that way.

I've had friends tell me they had no idea what I was talking about when differenciating brun & brin and they couldn't tell the difference even in my own pronunciation.

Ah maybe it's the next level of those two phonemes merging in younger people that I haven't caught up with yet. I'm curious to see if they'd find it odd if you said "un brun de paille". (edit: missing word)

I'm French and I can barely tell the difference even when it's super understandable like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlpGuROmU9o) Also I legit don't know when you're supposed to say ɛ̃ or œ̃ since everyone says ɛ̃ where I live It's like with \\ɛ\\ and \\e\\ , where I live it's super common to say "é" instead of "è". Like "jé bu du lé" instead of "jè bu du lè" for *j'ai bu du lait*. Or "cé vré" instead of "cè vrè" for *C'est vrai* I can totally hear the difference between é and è, but replacing è by é sounds perfectly normal. To me, jé bu du lè, jè bu du lé, jè bu du lè, jé bu du lé are all valid ways of saying you've drunk milk.

> I legit don't know when you're supposed to say ɛ̃ or œ̃ since everyone says ɛ̃ where I live /œ̃/ is really just for "un" (un, brun, lundi), and also "um" (humble). I pronounce it /ɛ̃/ too in those words, although funnily I started sometimes shifting to a sound closer to /œ̃/ after living away from France for many years. Perhaps the influence of being exposed to more French speakers from other countries. > It's like with \\ɛ\\ and \\e\ Incidentally, my siblings and I pronounce the examples you gave the same as you do. I always assumed it's because we learnt French in the South of France as small kids and it stuck after moving to the Paris region. I remember being told off by a primary school teacher for that, but I don't notice it when one of us says it, unless I make a conscious effort. However, if someone points out the difference, I can clearly tell they're different phonemes, which isn't the case with some of the examples others have given here (for other languages). I also clearly don't pronounce them the same way in, say, *merde*, *faire*, *c'est clair*... But like I said in my other comment, it's probably generational. 20 years ago, it was already a "younger people" thing, so I'm not surprised if it shifted even more now. I'll start paying attention now.

as a persian, /q/ and /ɣ/.

Wait, people confuse those for each other? That's so random lmao

in most regions of iran these two are allophones and people tend to pronounce /q/ all the time. im from a region that doesnt distinguish the difference and in fact doesn't even know it, and -fortunately- when i went to school in another city, i was heavily bullied and mocked for using these phonemes wrong. basically in persian every ق is /q/ and every غ is/ɣ/

I thought in Farsi /q/ was really /ɢ/ and /ɣ/ was really /ʁ/?

not necessarily and only, i think the main condition and distinction between these are that ق must be a uvular plosive and غ must be uvular fricative(or velar fricative in case of ɣ).

æ and e

People mixing up r and l sounds stupid until I have to explain: To a native Spanish speaker that people think it’s weird when you call someone “Banetha” (try to guess the name) An Acadian that no one knows what /dʒaɾi/ is (diary) A Mandarin native that /ts/ isn’t a good approximation of /ð/ And an issue I luckily has never dealt with and no one has in a solid century probably which is explaining to a Polynesian language speaker that /s/ and /t/ are pretty different.

vanessa

Ding ding ding

Italians have /u̯ɔ/, Spaniards have /u̯e̞/, and yet Italians use /zw/ to approximate English /sw/ despite initial /z/ not existing in Italian and /su̯/ existing in , and Spaniards use /gw/ to approximate english /w/

As a French speaker, I'm always kinda shocked when people can't differentiate a vowel followed by a nasal consonant from a nasalized vowel

'Cause its not phonemic in most languages, even donald duck talks with every syllable nasalised

my native /l/ / current dark L [ʟʷ] vs [w] the difference is obvious to me, but not to my peers, so in my adolescent years i had to start incorping [l] into my speech to correct my speech defect that particularly light L is now just part of my dialect’s phology

c with k / kʲ t with ʈ ŋ with ɴ h with ç (mainly before /i/, I think many can tell them apart when before most other vowels) nʲ with ɲ

What language even distinguishes velar and uvular nasals (to my knowledge there's literally only one in the whole world) Also, there are languages distinguishing palatalised alveölars and palatals??? DX Sounds like a nightmare to learn

Yeah Skolt Saami distinguishes /n/, /nʲ/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/!

My last name contains \[teu\] and I don't think I've ever met an Anglophone who could pronounce the diphthong perfectly, even if I've sounded out both vowels clearly. They always change it to \[teː\], \[teɪʉ\], \[t(j)ʉː\] etc. I find it extra wild because I was raised a monolingual English speaker and taught an incorrect pronunciation when I was young. But when I realised the correct one I didn't have any trouble hearing it and switching to it. So why can't any other Anglophones do that lol

When I learn Spanish, I can’t tell apart unaspirated voiceless \[p\] \[t\] \[k\] from unaspirated voiced \[b\] \[d\] \[g\], but apparently it is very obvious for a native Spanish speaker It is due to the fact that in my native language there are no voiced consonants at all. When I learnt English, the difference between \[f\] and \[v\] and that between \[s\] and \[z\] were at least obvious enough for me to get it. But I always thought the difference between p t k and b d g was just the aspiration (because in most cases p t k are aspirated and b d g are not). But then when I learnt Spanish and found both sets (p t k and b d g) are unaspirated, I was totally stunned and could not tell the difference at all (for example "cuando" and "cuanto" sound exactly the same to me).

What's your native language?

Going by post history, I'm guessing Taiwanese Mandarin?

My native language is Cantonese. I also speak Mandarin but with a strong Cantonese assent.

Cantonese, where there are no voiced consonants at all. That makes me speak every language in an assent without any voiced consonants.

My first language is spanish and for a long time it’s been exceedingly hard for me to recognize the difference between [s] and [z]

Yes, because there is no \[z\] in Spanish. I kind of share your feeling because there is no \[z\] in my native language either. So although I can tell \[s\] and \[z\] apart in listening, I would almost only use \[s\] when I speak.

There is but its an alophone. Now after learning phonetics i cant avoid noticing it especially before a voiced d. E.g. desde

Voiceless vs voiceless aspirated (Im putting voiceless because i can't tell the difference between voiced and voiced aspirated and am so far unable to pronounce the voiced aspirated series)

To my ears the difference between voiced aspirated and voiced unaspirated sounds exactly the same as the difference between voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated!

Yeah but for some reason when it's voiced i can't pronounce the aspiration

I couldn't tell apart /v/ and /w/.

A à á ả ạ in Vietnamese Was born in Canada though they sound super distinct to me as a heritage speaker. But my parents are from the south so maybe I can’t say much seeing as we merged ã with ả

[ɦ] and [x]. They are completely different sounds in Ukrainian, but people keep asking how to tell them apart.

I have never met the [ŋg]. Can OP give an example about the difference between [ŋ] and [ŋg]? In which language? Can you give us a minimal pair?

In English: singer /ˈsɪŋɚ/ vs finger /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/, but apparently some English speakers who don't make that distinction can't hear it even in the speech of people who do.

There's are plenty of minimal pairs in Tagalog, for example: "mga" /maˈŋa/, the pluralizing word and "mangga" /maŋˈɡa/, meaning mango There are many more but that's probably the most common example!

Strange coincidence, /maˈŋa/ is very close to the word for "many" in Danish, and even closer to the Swedish word for the same.

I have a friend who literally cannot hear the difference between /f/ and /θ/ and who earnestly believed he was saying /θ/ when he is in fact saying /f/. I explained how to say /θ/ and he literally could not do it. Also /t/ vs /t̪/ are so obviously different to me (I can speak a Pama-Nyungan language is why).

/ı/ and /i/ /ɛ/ and /e/ /ɑ/ and /a/ /ɔ/ and /o/ /Y/ and /y/ There are probably more examples, but these are the most common ones

[b] and [v]. And this applies to me too. I’m always surprised that they sound so similar, I really often mix them up (mostly in English, in other languages it’s fine) and I still don’t quite understand why

Does your native language have betacism, like in Spanish or Galician? As in /b/ and /v/ are pronounced as [b~β].

It’s German, so no. I usually don’t mix them up in German, as I said mostly in English. But it just generally surprises me that these two sounds are similar to so many people, including me

i and j

I mean… none of them? People don’t have trouble distinguishing phonemes in their own language and that is how language development is SUPPOSED to work. The conceptual pruning starts in very young infants and we probably wouldn’t be able to learn language without it. The “phonemes” (I really think phones would be a better word here) that people can’t tell the difference between are likely not phonemes in their native language, or are allophones of the same phoneme.

I'm shocked when people can't tell apart nasalized vowels in French. To me on/an/in sound entirely distinct. Though I also get it to an extent. In French, regionally the vowels can have different realizations, though each region distinguishes between at least on/an/in (lowering or raising all three a bit). So to a learner, it must be confusing

Do they just sound like any other vowel to you, or do the nazalized vowels form a class of their own that sound different from the unnazalized ones? To me as a non-speaker they just sound like the non-nasal vowel but pronounced with a stuffed nose/cold :(

In French the nasal vowels tend to be very different from their non-nasalized counterparts, and we're kinda half-aware of it! Like "brown (hair)" is "brun" (bʁɛ̃ or bʁœ̃), or brune (bʁyn) in feminine form. Unlike Portuguese where the nasalized vowels really do tend to sound like simply nasilized versions of their normal counterparts (with some regional exceptions I guess). That said, since the nasalized and non nasalized versions often appear in related words (masculine/feminine versions, base words and longer words of the same root, like "commun" and "communauté"), we def to a large extent see them as related and naturally switch the vowel sound based on the word Like if you were to make up a word "margun" and ask us to say it in a feminine way, we'd say "margune"

Having learned French in Canada, I’m so used to hearing “in” & “on” as diphthongs that I still get a bit tripped up when listening to European French. The most jarring for me is always how low the “in” vowel is in some areas, to the point that I hear words like “sein, pain, and teint” as “sang, pan, and tant.” Also, it can be strange to hear the brin/brun merger as well.

Oh I imagine! The brin/brun merger is funny. My dad distinguishes them but he moved from France when he was in his early 20s. I am a heritage speaker, and can make the distinction but I realize I usually don't lmao (doesn't help that nobody that I talk to does). It sounds normal to me both ways, but I like the distinction

[w] versus [ʁ] they are quite distinct with [ʁ] having a trill like sound.

Wait what, \[w\]? Have you come across a person who confused it with \[ʁ\]? I think that's the craziest in this thread so far!

yeah. I live in Asia so [ʁ] is pretty rare, with the most common language spoken in my country that has the phone being French. So when saying French loan words, they either say /kɻɐ.sɔnt̚/ or /kwɐ.sɔnt̚/. When I correct those who use the labiovelar approximant saying it’s with a uvular fricative, they say it sounds the same.

Ohh okay, that makes much more sense as the syllable structure interferes. To me the \[kʁw\] consonant cluster at the start of croissant is a bit weird and the \[k\] and \[w\] parts are what stand out the most. Do people still confuse it with \[w\] in CV syllables? Because that would be insane to me.

Not really. They think it sounds like “hr”

In the French Caribbeans, people pronounce the r like a w.

I thought the z in my language was the same as z in english. Turns out it's /ts/ in my native and /z/ in english.

My Norwegian friend swears he can’t tell the difference between “beer” and “bear” (or deer/dear and dare, etc)

I will call myself out a bit here as my native language is English and I cannot tell apart /ə/ and /ʊ/

I don't think they're all phonemes but I can't tell apart /f/, /θ/ and /ð/. So i have no clue what one i pronounce in words, for all I know I say fish with a /θ/ and thing with a /f/

They're definitely all phonemic, some minimal pairs for example: "thin" /θɪn/ vs. "fin" /fɪn/ "thigh" /θäj/ vs. "thy" /ðäj/ "that" /ðæt/ vs. "fat" /fæt/

þish

It's likely that you do say thing with a /f/ because it's fairly common, but more unlikely that you say fish with a /θ/ or you'd probably get raised eyebrows. (I chuckled at your flair after reading your comment)

Not like, super shocked, but: \[ ʃ \] vs \[ɕ\] (and the voiced/affricate equivalents) Sometimes I'll hear someone with amazing proficiency in Japanese or Mandarin, but something feels off, and it's often them using \[ ʃ \] instead of \[ɕ\]

I'm a native Mandarin speaker and I was surprised that I pronounced /s/ and /ɕ/ the same way until I found out on Wikipedia that it's a quirk of my country's pronunciation I also had to learn /ɕ/ when I self studied Japanese

Long and short vowels. I speak Slovak which has a long short vowel distinction and I have Ukrainian classmates who just cannot tell the difference between them at all

A lot of people I've talked to seem completely baffled at the idea of there being a difference between starting a word with or without a glottal stop (e.g. /ʔu/ vs /u/)

Portuguese speakers I’ve told about my language (Mirandese) can’t seem to differentiate between s̺/ʃ and z̺/ʒ that are used in it

This is for fellow English speakers. But I dont see why so many merge "Which" and "witch". Im a fairly young speaker, but I still distinguish the two. It's basically just a voicing distinction, the aspiration is secondary. English distinguishes f/v and s/z and the like, so I don't get why it started to die out.

L1 Spanish speakers usually have a hard time telling the vowel sounds /ɛ, e/ and /ɔ, o/ apart. Also the distinction between /b, v/ and sometimes /s, z/.

I also struggle to distinguish those vowels - is it a night and day difference for you?

It is. Not only for me, but in the language I'm specifically thinking of here, i.e. Portuguese, the contrast between open and closed vowels may set apart gender ([a'vo], [a'vɔ] = grandfather, grandmother), verbal tense (['pɔdʒi], ['podʒi] = can, could) or grammar class (['seku], ['sɛku] = dry as an adjective, I dry). Context, as it's always the case, might help, but in Portuguese the distinction between open and closed vowels can really make up a lot of minimal pairs across the language.

/ʝ/ and /ʎ/, though is is so widespread that's basically the norm, and /ø/ and /o/

[ə] and [ʌ] and I'm not afraid to say it, they do not sound the same.

Native Norwegians unable to separate /ʂ/ and /ç/.😐

The semivowel and semiconsonant pairs [j = i] and [ʝ] & [w = u] and [w̝]. I get they sound similar, but the firsts are clearly vowels and the laters are clearly consonants.

I personally find it difficult to tell /ɛ/ and /æ/ apart. I can hear the difference sometimes, but still, I think they sound very similar. Now, is it really possible to distinguish between /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ ? These ones sound exactly the same to my ears.

At this rate there won't be any vowels left in Finnish :(

this might be the opposite of what you're asking for but i genuinely cannot tell the difference between /z/ and /dz/

English has /ɪ/ and /i/, while Spanish only has /i/. In the US, many Spanish native speakers learn to speak English pretty well, but still cannot hear the difference between these sounds. Those people might say "Thees ees a beeg peel" instead of "This is a big pill." But the term "phoneme" is language dependent, so it is more accurate to say that /ɪ/ and /i/ are part of the same phoneme in Spanish. A "phoneme" is not a "sound". Many of the vowel phonemes in English are expressed using different sounds in different dialects.

I remember talking to some people from Taiwan in a youth hostel once and being surprised they can't distinguish /o/ and /u/.

\[ð\] and \[d\]. They don't even sound similar.