Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still to this day, cannot hear what syllables are in words. ‘Cat’, 1? I hear 2. > I cannot understand when I mispronounce words. I get corrected often and repeat back the correction but it sounds like what I said the first time. Interestingly, both of these 'symptoms' are completely normal, for people learning a second language.
Especially from languages that don't have the same final and consonant cluster options that English does. For example Richard in Chinese is commonly transliterated as Lichade (lee-char-duh), even though it's only two syllables in English, and Charles is Cha'ersi (char-err-suur).
Hearing problems and production problems are both common, and they overlap heavily, but they don't overlap perfectly.
Speaking of how people perceive foreign words, I'm still interested in the following:
1. Mandarin and Cantonese both use the sounds /s/ (just like English S) and /f/ (ditto, just like English F, though there are Chinese speakers who, like the Japanese, don't distinguish F and H).
2. Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese uses the sound /θ/ (beginning of the English words thorn, thunder, thwack, etc.).
3. Mandarin speakers perceive an English [θ] as being the sound /s/. It's not just that they hear it as something strange but get /s/ when they try to produce it - they cannot hear the difference between [θ] and [s]. I have a friend who learned to produce [θ] accurately, which didn't help much because her English experience is mainly auditory and she ends up using [θ] in words that use /s/.
4. Cantonese speakers are different; for them, an English [θ] is the sound /f/. This means that if a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker both listen to an English speaker pronounce "thin", neither will necessarily perceive anything particularly strange about the word, but they will disagree with each other's attempts to mimic it.
5. By now, there must be many people who are native speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin.
6. What do they think when they hear [θ]? My best guess is that they can tell it's a strange sound, but I don't really know.
> Richard in Chinese is commonly transliterated as Lichade (lee-char-duh), even though it's only two syllables in English, and Charles is Cha'ersi (char-err-suur).
I should note that the Mandarin syllable cha is not at all rhotic; the transcription "char" only makes sense if your variety of English doesn't have rhotic vowels.