One of the problems in language and especially accent learning is that we lose in childhood the ability to distinguish sounds that we do not hear. Is phoneme the work I want for the sounds in a language?
We hear all sorts of sounds, even the ones that are not in our language. That is what accent is, hearing the difference between the phonemes in your language (or dialect) and how non-native speakers pronounce them slightly differently. What happens is that we perceive sounds differently. (For example, most anglophones when they hear the Japanese voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/, as in futon, perceive it to be an f or a w).) Acoustically, the t in top, stop and the one in pot all differ slightly from one another, but most native English speakers perceive them as being the same sound or phoneme. Theese different pronunciations of a phoneme are called allophones.
