An experiment with phonetic writing

[Jorge_Stolfi]

to understand the language you must be able to distinguish between phonemes.

I lived 13 years in the US, and by the end my spoken English was good enough for most practical purposes, such as giving lectures.  I even could almost get the point of Monty Python's jokes.

But to this day I cannot tell the difference between the vowels of "man" and "men", unless the two words are spoken right next to each other.  My brain maps both to the same open-"e" phoneme of Portuguese/French/Italian/etc before they get to the language processor.  So that is an error I would probably make -- inconsistently -- if I had to take dictation of unfamiliar words in English.

And I would probably map each schwa to a random vowel, or omit it altogether.

(And of course I would get the spelling of unfamiliar words totally wrong.  But that is not relevant here.)

All the best, --stolfi