alt Hacker NewsThe reason you're not hearing any difference between the words in those pairs is because they are pronounced the same. At least according to Wiktionary and my own subjective judgement as a German native speaker.
The reason you're not hearing any difference between the words in those pairs is because they are pronounced the same. At least according to Wiktionary and my own subjective judgement as a German native speaker.
I've actually messed with Audacity once, extracting the vowels, lengthening them and overlaying, and there is definitely a difference in quality (the length is pretty much the same), it's just that it's very minor to my ear. But native English speakers apparently can pick them up with little trouble.
The difference is much easier to spot in pairs like "bead"/"bid", but that's mainly because before the voiced consonants the long vowel is actually longer than the short one, and the speakers usually add a small glide of "y" at the end of it, so it's more like "beeyd".