I’ve been dabbling recreationally in a few languages, checking their phonetic repertoire, and one thing that’s making me very confused is my apparent inability to tell nasalized sounds apart from the non-nasalized ones. For instance, Portuguese with its nasalized vowels is giving me major problems, since it’s often the case that nasalization is a minimal pair (for example, to me “avó” sounds exactly the same as “avõ”). And Mandarin Chinese has the distinction between final “n” and “ng”, again, often a minimal pair, so to me “mēn” sounds exactly like “mēng”. At least in English there’s not such a reliance in minimal pairs between “n” and “ng”, and you can make do pronouncing /ŋ/ as a separate /ng/, or even a plain /n/ for -ing verb endings. Is my problem too unusual? (Couldn’t find any data online on difficulties hearing them apart, only on difficulties pronouncing them correctly.) And can I do anything to help me tell them apart more reliably?
I’m too deaf to tell the difference, myself
Most people can sensitize themselves to the difference between similar sounds at least somewhat, but you might not develop as fine a perception of it as you would have if you’d grown up with a language where nasality mattered more. One way to do it is to listen to minimal pairs and guess which is which, which is slow going, but most people will eventually make headway. It’s significantly faster if you have a native speaker who can say them instead of playing a recording, and even faster if they let you touch their face while they do, but that’s awkward for most people.
Just to probe a little, /n/ and /ŋ/ are both nasal, they just differ in place of articulation- is it maybe just a difficulty perceiving nasal sounds generally as opposed to distinguishing them from non-nasals? I would generally give the same advice either way, but you might want to critically listen to people from where you grew up, maybe they don’t enunciate much between the two sounds.
I’m a Spanish speaker, and in that language nasals don’t get used much besides of the obvious m/n contrast. I don’t have access to native speakers, and in the minimal pair listening tests (for Chinese endings at least) it’s basically a coin flip to me. I read somewhere that it’s also becoming a problem for Beijing speakers, that sometimes can no longer can tell “n” and “ng” apart: jstor.org/stable/23756149
In most (in all, afaik, but there are a lot, so I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush) dialects of Spanish, /n/ and /ŋ/ are allophones, with /ŋ/ occurring preceding another velar sound, like the n in cinco, conga or conquistador (I’m sorry for the examples, they’re just the first ones that come to mind).
Maybe try contrasting cinco:cinto and conga:conta at first (or other minimal pairs with an n preceding a velar consonant vs an n preceding any other phone). It should be easier to distinguish in your native language first, then to apply it to languages you’re learning.
Even if you’re 50:50 on minimal pairs in Spanish, if you practice it for a few minutes most days, you should see some improvement.
If you don’t after several weeks, there might be an auditory issue or something similar (or you might just need a different approach, though this is generally the fastest way to sensitize yourself afaik), but that still won’t prevent you from being able to become fluent if that’s your goal- you just might have an accent and need to clarify some things. But given that Beijingers are beginning to blend the sounds, you might also encounter few issues related to this that get in the way of fluency.
Why can’t I see any of your posts or comments?
I’m posting from a self-hosted Friendica instance and instance syncing can take a while, that’s probably why
Your account is almost 3 years old, though? Edit: Oh, it’s probably complicated, never mind. As you were.
The account is three years old from my side, it might be that the Lemmy instance is confused as it doesn’t use Lemmy or PieFed exactly. Something similar happens with Mastodon commenters if I recall correctly.
I don’t think it’s getting through at all. 6 hours later and you’re still at 0 / 0. It’s not a huge deal, but it does raises a tiny red flag in isolation.