Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity - sheet/shit, peace/piece/piss.
We have only seven vowel sounds. A i u and open / closed e o. But different parts of the country often use only one of the two e and o sounds.
In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times). Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty.
(For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)
(Going off of memory here, I probably butchered the pronunciation anyway).
/ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English, and for whatever reason it was incredibly hard for me to perceive it there.
There was probably other more subtle differences between the two that did not make it into the transcription (e.g., his native name was pronounced with his native accent instead of his English accent)
If you compare [ta] and [da], you find that the only difference is the time between when you make the consonant, and when your vocal chords start vibrating (voice onset time). In theory, VOT is a contimum, with any value being possible. However, in English it forms a tri-modal distribution /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/. The experiment artificially edited a sound to vary between /t/ and /d/, including with VOTs between the two that do not occur in English. What they found is that people put all of the sounds in 2 boxes, and were unable to distinguish between sounds in the same box, even if their VOT varied considerably.
However, when test subjects were played the same sounds, but told they were listening to rain drops, this effect disapeared, and they were able to distinguish between sounds in the same box.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.103...
Seems to be exactly what you describe.
They also used an ABX methodology, which forces the subject to put sounds into boxes by essentially asking if X is more like A or B, not if X is different from both.
The one I am thinking of used an odd-one-out methodology, where the subject was presented with AAX, and asked to pick which sound was different from the others (where the others were genuinly the same sound). The one I am thinking of also found a priming effect, which yours apparantly didn't.
Doesn't gendarme start with /ʒ/? Adopted word from French, but almost all words have origins somewhere else.
I never noticed that until now. While it's obviously not an English word, plenty of English speakers have discussed French explorer Jacques Cousteau. I can't think of any other examples.
One of the languages I know allows for a word-initial /ŋ/, which English does not have at all.
Vietnamese, by chance? I'm guessing that because the only initial /ŋ/ word on my radar is the name Nguyen.
There are (at least) 3 different consonants in Hindi that just sound like "T" to me. So it took me 3 attempts to spell this Hindi word correctly. The kids all absolutely lost their minds with laughter at this - they were all yelling (what I heard as) "no not tuh, TUH" and just couldn't understand why I couldn't tell the difference.
If you get a tone wrong, sometimes people will understand the erroneous word due to surrounding context. But pretty often you'll just elicit a blank stare. This is especially the case for short phrases, e.g. when you're asking for directions.
I wish. My teachers have no problem telling apart my j and q, but I rarely hear the difference despite all the cosonants in my native language coming in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs.
j / zh
q / ch (the former is further forward in the mouth than 'ch' in English, and the latter further back, with a fully clenched mouth)
https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...
There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.
What are those four ways?
I did a search in cmudict and found examples!
sample → /s/
treasure → /ʒ/
visible → /z/
unsure → /ʃ/
I could probably have thought of these eventually, but cmudict made it a whole lot quicker.
It's really helpful to understand the theory behind the pronunciation, instead of just repeating words and attempt to make the same sounds as my coach. As in "this is what your tongue should be doing, but you're doing this other thing instead."
You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong. For example, there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English. It's just something that never crossed my mind before starting to work with a professional.