You are actually not alone in this, it’s totally normal to not perceive the difference in sounds which are not phonemic in your native language. This can be overcome by training with minimal pairs. There’s a great bit about this in a book called Fluent Forever.

Edit: I just got out of a doctor’s appt and have time now so I’ll just paraphrase as I remember it. When we are babies our brains learn to ignore the difference in sounds that don’t cause a change in meaning. So a child growing up in an English speaking environment has no trouble differentiating the English language “R” and “L” sounds from each other. Japanese doesn’t distinguish these sounds, and has its own sound which is somewhere in between. So when Japanese speakers hear either sound, their brain just puts both into the same bucket.

If you play an audio recording for a Japanese listener and then ask them whether that said “rug” or “lug”, they literally can’t hear the difference. This is normal. But if you play audio recordings like this- “Rug” and “Lug” are minimal pairs, words that differ only by one phoneme - ask the listener which word they heard AND immediately give them feedback on whether their response was correct or incorrect, they learn to differentiate the sounds rather quickly.

Hindi has a lot of retroflex consonants that likely don’t exist phonemically in your language. It’s only natural that you cannot distinguish them. But by training your ear with minimal pairs, you will learn to hear the difference. You could try searching “Hindi minimal pairs training” or check out the book I mentioned, the author actually has compiled resources for various specific languages.

I’m already fluent in English and Spanish, and mildly proficient in German and Mandarin.

The next languages on my list, after improving my fluency in German and Mandarin, are:

Latin, French, Portuguese

Ancient and Modern Greek

Sanskrit and Hindi

Irish (language of many of my recent ancestors and endangered language)

Guaraní (I plan to live in Paraguay would actually use this regularly living there).

Russian

Arabic

I know that’s more than 5, but these are all languages I have begun to dabble in at various points, and I feel like if I learned all of them to fluency or near fluency, my language learning obsession would finally be satisfied and I could retire from it, so to speak.

I just read Proto recently also. I second the recommendation, great book.

Thank you very much, this is the sort of thing I was hoping existed.

Thank you for the information! Very much appreciated!

Thanks

If I pay an application fee and my application isn’t accepted, I’m just charging it back on the credit card.

So you knew what you said was incorrect but said it anyway. You shouldn’t do that, it’s just going to cause confusion.

The DPRK is actually democratic though, did you mean to compare them to the comprador bourgeois dictatorship of “south Korea”?

Every time I think capitalism has run out of ways to be disgusting, it innovates and finds a new way to gross me out.

That red sails article was a great read, thank you for sharing it.

That’s actually true with regards to some of the missiles.

There was an NYPD officer posting here lol unless it ended up just being a bit.

Thanks for providing that context. The wording of “all the anti-Zionist Jews on the planet” still seems off-putting, probably incorrect and unnecessary.

Excellent summary, thanks for taking the time to type up this comment.

What’s with the wording of that tweet? Is the account actually anti-semitic?

Comments are saying that video clip is old and that’s not what is being said in the clip.

RedDawn remembers

This story is kind of old but I saw some right wing slop promoting this as a “huge deal” and a “game changer” crediting the Trump admin with such brilliance.

The CIA is making Youtube videos in mandarin begging Chinese officials to defect and spill state secrets. Its hard to imagine anything more pathetic and desperate.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2025/05/02/the-cia-using-youtube-to-recruit-disillusioned-chinese-officials/

Thanks for explaining that.