I’ve been trying to focus on listening practice since that is what annihilated me on the recent JLPT. I’ve started listening to this audiobook (presumably you need a Spotify subscription to access it, sorry).
In every track, they enact a dialogue in Japanese, and then play it again with English translations inserted. Before the replay, the narrator always says 今度はえいごがはいります。Emphasis added in bold (が).
My problem is, I know that they’re saying が. But in some lessons, I hear は. I even played these for my native Japanese speaking partner who says she can hear が clearly. This seems problematic to me if I cannot even recognize the difference between the sounds “ha” and “ga” which are both pretty common in English. I’m sure it’s related both to (a) the speed of the reading and (b) the hard “g” in えいご preceding the particle.
But I’m curious what others hear. If you do have access to that link above, skip to track 50, at the 0:59 timecode. Maybe I can hear a faint “g”, but it’s much softer than the first g in えいご, and my brain tends to want to ignore it and just hear “ha” or sometimes even more simply just “a”.
One thing that happens a lot in these contexts is nasalization where が is pronounced more like ngha. I can’t access your link to check if that’s what happening here, but it might explain why you hear something “softer” than the preceding ご.
Edit while I’m here: Re: “this seems problematic to me if I cannot even […]”, imo you should not feel so discouraged. Even if your partner can discern / interpret it, it may still be a hard listening exercise from a non-native perspective. To improve at listening takes a lot of input where you let little slips like this wash over you until eventually you’ve seen enough edge-cases to feel confident making one-off judgements.
I think my brain also inverts sounds sometimes. I often hear “shite” as “ishte”, and I’m pretty convinced my brain is stealing the “sh” and placing it before the “i”. I think the same thing happens with がはいります… the “ha” from hairimasu gets shoved in front of the “a” part of the “ga” (where I barely hear the nasal g as you say). And instead of “ahairimasu” (what I should hear if I’m not hearing the g) I hear “haairismasu”. Perhaps that tendency of mine to “consonant shift” is helping me to make the g even less noticeable than it already is. Stupid brain.