"In Alabama, both are pronounced "pee-uhn." People made fun of me when I first moved here for pronouncing pen as "pehn" and pin as, well "pin."
hawklawson: "Can I borrow a pehn?"
people: "Hahaha you need a 'pun'? Say it agin..."
And, to this day, when I'm scheduling appointments for patients over the phone...
hawklawson: "I have an opening for tehn o'clock."
people: "Huh? Whee-uhn j'you say?"
hawklawson: "I have an opening for tee-uhn a'clawk."
people: "Alrighty then put 'er down."
Source: I can turn my southern accent on and off."
And living for more than a decade in the country that simply can't produce some sounds of my mother's tongue, I catch myself having more problems voicing them. I know the difference but it's somehow harder, without the environment and the context. Somehow the tongue becomes almost numb to move like before.
It's almost trivial if you're trained to listen rather than decode. Opera singers can achieve perfect pronunciation of languages they don't comprehend at all, through the use of IPA. The words are absolutely meaningless to them, they're just very precisely recreating a certain set of sounds. Their musical listening skills transfer directly into pronunciation.
If you can learn to sing Sygyt as an adult, I think you can cope with a couple of tricky phonemes in a foreign language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_14pb2i6Sc
Like OP, I think that the comparison with visual art is very apt. Most people see on a functional level, identifying objects rather than seeing their literal forms. As a result, they tend to draw the abstract idea of a thing rather than the literal appearance of a thing. Learning to draw involves unlearning that windows are rectangular, that chairs have legs of equal length, that a soccer ball is spherical.
If we're primed to pay attention to one thing, it vastly diminishes our ability to recognise other things:
But the question is why you would want to do that? No human can speak all the world's languages, or realistically more than a few languages. This article is about a woman who is performing only in English.
It is certainly true that non-native speakers can learn a language quite well, after years of immersion and studied effort. Personally I don't think it's impossible for language learners to achieve native-level competence; I just think the number of people who achieve higher levels of competence decreases exponentially.
Based on my own experience of emigrating to a country using a different language than my native tongue, I think it can be done over time, but my understanding is that we use a different part of the brain for languages learned late in life.
This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition. (The so-called "critical period."[1]).
I think a fascinating example even within one language such as English is the "pin" vs "pen" pronunciation.[2]
And plenty of other 2nd-language learning examples such as English speakers missing the delicate "zh" sound in French "bonjour" and always pronouncing it with the hard "j" -- or trying to pronounce the Vietnamese "Nguyen" as "when" or "win". There's a (tonal) phoneme in Vietnamese that's nonexistent in English so it's very possible English listeners can't even hear it as a new distinct sound they have to replicate. The "when" or "win" is the closest approximation they will ever hear and because of that, they will always sound non-native.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_languag...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_m...