Why is spoken language so hard to understand?
&gt; We don&#x27;t notice how much adapting and adjusting our brain has to do in our own language, but in a new language, we have to re-learn those sound boundaries, for potentially dozens of new sounds.<p>Some examples from Japanese and English:<p>Japanese distinguishes between short and long vowels and between short and long consonants in a way that English does not. For example, the words <i>kata, katta,</i> and <i>kātā</i> (where <i>ā</i> indicates a long <i>a</i>) are pronounced differently and have different meanings (“shoulder,” “bought,” and “Carter,” respectively). Native English speakers learning Japanese as adults will often think at first that all three words sound the same (<i>kata</i>). Even after they become aware of the differences, they may still have trouble recognizing them in continuous speech.<p>Similarly, English makes phonemic distinctions that do not exist in Japanese. The most well known is that between <i>r</i> and <i>l</i>, so that, for example, “grass” and “glass” can sound the same even to fluent Japanese speakers of English.<p>My first language is English; I moved to Japan at the age of 26 and have lived here for 40 years. Although I speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, I still sometimes mishear words in spoken Japanese because, despite much study, effort, and experience, I have not fully acquired all of the phonemic distinctions.