I can FINALLY tell apart the R and L sounds!

I've been struggling so much with telling the difference between the R and L sounds, as in "right" vs "light", or "feel" vs "fear". Those sounds sound so similar to me, and they almost sound like vowels.

When I first started listening with the CI, and even now, the R and L sounded virtually the same to me. It was driving me nuts!

Now, I practiced listening on this site my speech pathologist gave me, and clicked on Lesson 4 to practice. At first, I was getting 50% correct, but that doesn't mean anything as there were only two choices to choose from. I could have my CI turned off and still gotten 50% correct purely by the law of probability.

Then I spent the next hour getting my brain to really really pick apart the difference between the R and L sounds. The way a Ph.D. in linquistics would, I analyzed the pitch, resonance, intonation, timing, and the richness of the beginning consonants of "light" and "right". After some time, they started sounding a little different. A little.

The R started to sound a little deeper and richer than the L, which in turn started to sound a bit thinner and blended with the succeeding vowel more than the R did. Then I tested myself again, and I got 16 correct out of 20. Not bad for a day's work of listening practice. That R/L monkey is finally off my back.