why I have difficulties in understanding spoken Swedish

[kareina]

mat = food
matt = weak/feeble
mätt = full/satisfied
mät = measurement

Look at that list of words. Notice how similar they are? The difference in sound between "mat" and "matt" is naught more than the length of time the vowel is pronounced. The difference between "mat" and "mät" is only a subtle change in the type of "a" sound made. In English there are regional accents which have FAR greater differences in how a vowel is pronounced and/or how much time it takes to say a vowel WITHOUT changing the word. The exact same word said by someone from New York as compared to the Southern US states as compared to the Midwestern US states as compared to England as compared to Scotland, etc. sounds Far, far more distinctly different than the above list of Swedish words. Yet, in Sweden, those subtle differences change the meaning to something else entirely. I grew up speaking a language with a deeply rooted understanding that there is a HUGE room for variation in vowels--one can make them longer or shorter or change the way in which they are pronounced and the word is still the same.

Not here. Here when I try to say a word that I know the odds are good that I will miss pronounce it enough to come up with another word I don't yet know. When they tell me I have said another word I ask them to repeat both words, and I CANNOT tell them apart. At all. To my ear they are the same. This has come up many times, with many different words. How am I going to learn to communicate in the spoken language if I can't tell one word from another? Reading. Reading is my friend. I can see the difference between the above words easily...


PS: Friday's progress report: worked on the discussion/conclusion section of the paper! We also sorted out some of the boxes which have been "temporarily" in the living room waiting for him to have a chance to go through them. Cleared out enough of them that it is once again possible to set up the keyboard. How much nicer yoga is while he is playing music for me--I spent about twice as long doing yoga last night than I had the last few.

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I understand English-speakers trying to learn Cantonese have a similar problem.

In the English speaking world, not being able to hear regional differences at most gets you some gentle (or not so gentle) teasing. When I moved (as a child) from Michigan to Ontario, I could not hear the difference between ten/tin or pen/pin. Michiganders pronounced them exactly the same and you simply depend on context to know which is which. In Ontario my schoolmates teased me for using the "wrong" word. On the other hand, my Kansas-bred mother could not hear the difference in the names of two kids in the Sunday School class she taught: Don and Dawn. To her, they sounded exactly the same, but the Michiganders insisted they were different and the kids would giggle when she called a child by the wrong name.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I can hear the differences between all of the pairs you provide above, so perhaps there is hope for me to more easily distinguish between mat and mät. But first I suspect I need to be able to actually remember which one is which!

[loupblanc.livejournal.com]

I was told once that native English speaker can have a really hard time hearing the sounds that are not native to their mother tongue, simply because their ear was never trained to find them. The point in case was all the nasal sounds French has (on, in, an) all sound the same to a native English-speaker. To me they are very distinct and so words like "son" "sein" "sans" all have their specific meaning (his, breast, without)

Because my native language has much more varied sounds (or maybe I'm special some would say, but I don't like that idea as it suggests only few people are actually able to learn foreign languages but that's beside the point), I never had much trouble picking up the subtleties of languages like Swedish and English. Finnish has in fact the same type of subtleties you're pointing out. "Tuli", "Tuuli" and "Tulli" (Came, Find and Fire if I remember correctly, it's been a while, in case a Finn reads this). What really got me puzzled about Swedish back when I would casually watch Swedish TV, was the very odd regional sounds some of them would make, in particular pronouncing "sj", something I could not reproduce because my palate / tongue was never trained for it.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Yah, sj, and some of the sk variants, and even worse when all three letters are involved are just plain hard to say. I have hope that I will get them, eventually.