CalifJim You may be trying to fine tune your pronunciation below the noise level, if you know what I mean.
Yeah... You mean that there are some features that 99% of native speakers would not notice, and so they tell nothing about someone's accent?
Anyway, you are right. I am already insane, and there might be no way back. You want to know one of the most insane things I noticed recently? I realized sometimes there are some sounds (vowels) that can be perceived in two or more different ways, depending on what sound you are expecting to hear. So you could hear a word like "Presidential" where the fist E sounds either like
eh, or
ih, or
uh. At the same time, lol. It depends on what you want to hear. If you imagine it said with one of those vowels, and expect that vowel, you'll hear that vowel. Obviously, it only works in some (maybe just a few) cases, and I feel those cases are the ones where a certain vowel falls between some other ones for some reasons (accent can be a reson), and so it's in the middle, and it's not a "pure" vowel of your dialect anymore... and you can associate it with the other sounds that are close to it and you are familiar with. I think that's more or less what happens when learners try to repeat English words without knowing anything about English vowels: they use the wrong vowels (the ones in their native language, usually), because that's what they hear.
And so sometimes I can't figure out what a certain vowel is that I hear, although I know English vowels. I often seem to hear vowels that seems to be between EH and UH, and I can't tell which one. It just seems a mix of them!
