It's not that you're unable to hear the difference, you have to pay closer attention to what you're really hearing. I'm a native french speaker and when first l

It's not that you're unable to hear the difference, you have to pay closer attention to what you're really hearing. I'm a native french speaker and when first learning english, I was made to carefully notice the subtle difference in certain vowels, intonations, silent consonants, etc. Like in sit and seat. The former vowel doesn't exist in french, so most french speakers learning english would pronounce it like the latter, as in "seat down". English vowels are very different from french, but there are some similarities and if you don't care to notice, you'll use approximations. E.g. imagine a french person saying "book", with the "ooh" sound and a noticeable exhalation after the k. Small little things like that can be brought to attention and corrected. It also doesn't help that we much rely on the written word to learn. Which reinforces the reliance on existing symbol-pronunciation associations, instead of creating new ones.