Re: Rating Languages

Herman Miller wrote:
> But when I took an
> articulatory phonetics class back in the late '80s, I had a much harder
> time learning to hear [k] as something other than [g] than I had with the
> other voiceless aspirated stops
Yeah, I've noticed that /k/ and /g/ are a much harder pair to
distinguish in Japanese than /p/ and /b/ or /t/ and /d/.  Is there
something about the velar POA that makes them harder to distinguish?
Japanese uses [N] as a free allophone of /g/ in non-initial positions,
so when that allophone is used, its very easy to distinguish from /k/,
and I wonder if that allophone might have some acoustic basis?

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