There can be big differences in the meanings of words with just a slight difference in pronunciation. maatar is airport, but matar is rain. Luckily, it would be difficult to confuse the meaning of those two words in context, but there are others where I have to be pretty careful. My ear and tongue are still having troubles distinguishing some of these differences. I’m not sure how good I’ll get at this since these sorts of things just aren’t all that important in English. I do think I’m getting a better feel for other pronunciation things like sekoon (a stopping of the sound) and shda (a “doubling” of the letter). At least now I realize that I’m getting confused with how pronunciation changes in different parts of the sentence, I used to just pronounce everything the same way. I think that that’s progress….
Isaac