Ah, interesting. Her use of context knowledge must be better than mine then. What I was thinking of when using the Swedish example was my perceiving "y" and "u" as two different kinds of our "ΓΌ", really, without actually being able to perceive them as distinctive phonemes. That is, I heard that they were different, but they were allophones to me, so it took me a while to find out which quality I was looking for in order to distinguish the two sounds. It's quite an interesting process, really. With "s" and "th", I think, German learners are basically taught to associate the more foreign-sounding of the two phonemes with the grapheme "th". And if you practice that over and over again, at some point, you can hear it. This referring to the act of learning, of course, where instinctive language acquisition fails for some reason.
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What I was thinking of when using the Swedish example was my perceiving "y" and "u" as two different kinds of our "ΓΌ", really, without actually being able to perceive them as distinctive phonemes. That is, I heard that they were different, but they were allophones to me, so it took me a while to find out which quality I was looking for in order to distinguish the two sounds.
It's quite an interesting process, really.
With "s" and "th", I think, German learners are basically taught to associate the more foreign-sounding of the two phonemes with the grapheme "th". And if you practice that over and over again, at some point, you can hear it.
This referring to the act of learning, of course, where instinctive language acquisition fails for some reason.