03-09-2026, 07:28 PM
(03-09-2026, 04:05 PM)rikforto wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.to understand the language you must be able to distinguish between phonemes.I lived 13 years in the US, and by the end my spoken English was good enough for most practical purposes, such as giving lectures. I even could almost get the point of Monty Python's jokes.
But to this day I cannot tell the difference between the vowels of "man" and "men", unless the two words are spoken right next to each other. My brain maps both to the same open-"e" phoneme of Portuguese/French/Italian/etc before they get to the language processor. So that is an error I would probably make -- inconsistently -- if I had to take dictation of unfamiliar words in English.
And I would probably map each schwa to a random vowel, or omit it altogether.
(And of course I would get the spelling of unfamiliar words totally wrong. But that is not relevant here.)
All the best, --stolfi