orlandohill wrote:There is a type of practical phonetic training called ear training. I'm still learning about it myself. Both the original descriptions of L-R and the book, Fluent Forever, talk about listening to audio recordings of minimal pairs, but there's more to it than that.rvilcheszamora wrote:When you refer to "perceive and disting sounds of English" what should be a method to improve it?
Indeed. Minimal pairs have always been particularly popular in Japan, but I vaguely remember reading a study carried out in Japan with first year university students where the students who got minimal pair training in the first semester weren't any better at phoneme discrimination than people who hadn't... except when given the same type of minimal pair phoneme descrimination that they'd been practicing doing. (I believe the other half were given the minimal pairs practice in the second semester so that they weren't missing out even if there was any advantage.)
I.e. minimal pairs is something you can learn to do as an isolated task even without modifying your language model, by directing specific attention to the expected difference.
I've long held that sound discrimination has to start with making your brain understand that a certain sound distinction is meaningful and important. I believe that the best way to do this is to start trying to consciously make your pronunciation a reasonable approximation of a native voice. Once your brain knows roughly where all the phonemes are, it'll know that they're important and start to hear them.