kareina

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.