It's as if my brain is binning these sounds together and I can not retrain the binning.
Polish has a retroflex and palatalized “sh” pair of sounds (Sz vs ś) that I can pronounce perfectly but not clearly distinguish as a listener.
I learned Polish when I was 5, moved back to the states when I was 11, barely used it for 7 years, and relearned it when I was 18. I don’t know if (at 5) I ever distinguished between the two. But I certainly struggle now.
To be fair, I've only been learning for a short while (8 months or so) and haven't had much opportunity to listen to a lot of different speakers so perhaps this may get better.
That said, any other tips on pronunciation are greatly appreciated! I did not realise that the tongue makes the same shape with both letters - I was not making a proper bowl with ض.
> I speak English with them
You seem to know the answer already :) Kids regularly find "more reliable" adults and weight their opinion, manners and ideas higher than others, so if you're mainly speaking English to them, they'll default to trying to adopt to that, even if the main language is different all around them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01636...
The babies are exposed to French the whole pregnancy and after, it's the foreign Hebrew/German they are testing for.
This is a meaningless comment.
The study is most likely bunk, but this nit pick is boring and wrong, they should have enough native French exposure already, it's the foreign language that matters.
For a native language, the unborn baby gets a lot of exposure. Only with a foreign language would an unborn baby get a small amount of exposure.
"Prenatal linguistic exposure shapes language brain responses at birth"
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08594-8>
By the way, it's a great research paper (as far as I can understand it), and in my opinion, the Université de Montréal summary doesn't do it justice.
Nevertheless, I'm basically illiterate when it comes to writing Russian.
Easy to spot bullshit that sounds more like an April Fools post than anything else.
To me the point is to toss as much at the brain as possible. Not limit yourself or your child with monoculture.
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The result described in this press release isn't new. We already knew that neonates are able to distinguish languages they've been exposed to from languages that they haven't been. What this study adds is "we documented an existing known result, but with some pictures of brain activity".
Brain activity is always good for an extra publication. Compare the classic paper Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf .
make3•4mo ago
roschdal•4mo ago
They do this to everyone already.
worthless-trash•4mo ago
bloqs•4mo ago
worthless-trash•4mo ago
make3•3mo ago
worthless-trash•3mo ago
yapyap•4mo ago
mierz00•4mo ago
Specifically, that athletes tend to do better when anxious.
I think about this very often when I find myself very comfortable and under no stress, I can feel my performance dropping.