t and d confussion

Squirrel   Thu Jan 14, 2010 4:10 pm GMT
I guess one of my major problems with English understanding is when people who talk very rapid pronounce either of a pair of words whose soundind only differs by the final letter, when this letter is a d or a t, I mean like hide/height, hid/hit, right/ ride. Like for example, if someone said "he hid the ball", I wouldn't be sure if that person said hid or hit. Do native speakers have also this difficulty to differentiate between the 2 sounds?
Ania   Thu Jan 14, 2010 6:38 pm GMT
I'm not a native speaker but I find what you wrote very interesting.

I can tell you that there's no way native speakers confuse those words. That's because of two reasons - not only the consonant is different but also the length of the vowel itself. So there's no chance they can confuse it...

Tell me, where are you from?
Drewskie   Fri Jan 15, 2010 1:28 am GMT
There actually is an audible difference between those. The ones you list that end in a 't' come to a much sharper, faster ending, whereas the ones that end in a 'd' are held longer, and the 'd' is actually pronounced. I hope that'll help you.
Squirrel   Fri Jan 15, 2010 9:07 pm GMT
Hello Ania, I'm from Spain.
Ania   Fri Jan 15, 2010 9:38 pm GMT
And I have also another question. Is it only you or do people you know feel the same way about these final consonants?

But back to the problem. I think that the meaning of each word in each pair (like hit-hid) is distinctive enough not to confuse them... not to mention pairs like hide and height which are even different parts of speech.

I wonder how it can be your major problem with understanding English.

However, is many contexts and in many dialects the /t/ is not pronounced at all and becomes a glottal stop. But it doesn't happen with /d/. So here it's getting a little bit complicated... but maybe the problem lies here? Just guessing.

As for the length of vowels, we can agree that only native speakers are able to hear the difference and unconsciously associate the vowel with the final consonant being voiced or not.
Drew   Sat Jan 16, 2010 9:12 pm GMT
Is that something we can agree on? It seems a little to convenient to just say "Only native speakers can do it." Antimoon pushes heavy amounts of input for this reason. Native speakers can discern subtle sounds because they've been hearing these sounds for years. Nothing stops you from doing the same given enough input.