Like a Japanese person trying to differentiate between l and r.

You don't even have to go outside of English for examples. See: the pen/pin distinction in English: some speakers have it, some can hear it when I speak, and some can't.

Aye, it's curious how one's upbringing affects their hearing. The Americans I interacted with can't tell the Czech P and B apart. Which I find fucking weird as mixing them up in Czech results in absolute gibberish. Probably similar to how TH and F sound the same to me.

The X in romanized Chinese is particularly bad, because depending on what part of China, HK, or Taiwain (or other Chinese-speaking country) the person is from, they would pronounce it quite differently. Enough that if you learned from one, the others would try to correct your pronunciation, assuming that you learned it wrong.

Not hearing the difference is absolutely a thing. I took a university class on the nature of language and I still have clear memories of some of the example videos we watched when we studied the phenomenon. It’s a very “how is this possible” kind of feeling.

Iirc it just depends on the language(s) you spoke while developing. You could probably hear the difference when you were very little.

I’m gunna imagine this was you asking to get it perfect instead of close enough? ‘Cause then I can see them trying to help and the sound being a little tricky.

From my experience it seems like people, in general, would just rather a barely approximate attempt. The guy in the comic isn’t even trying to get it right and if they are then I’m sorry but they are profoundly stupid. It’s english words smashed together, we have the sounds and not even getting close is honestly pathetic.