ah I meant things like leader vs reader (the front end), but you’re right, the back end depends a lot on geography!
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I still remember my coworkers not believing me when I said “light” and “right” and claimed I said two different words
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Yep I guess you’re right!
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Wait, what?!?
I thought they only had trouble with the pronunciation differences between R and L when they have to speak the words. But I had no idea they don’t distinguish the difference when listening. That’s… yeah… 
Now I wonder if there are sounds we don’t hear from Japanese?
On the other hand, with what media (films and music) I’ve been exposed to:
I hear some (most) Japanese using Rs to sound off that column, while some (fewer but not insignificant) will sound it off with Ls - the latter mostly with music, so maybe it’s an “artistic license” of sorts?
Then there’s TokiniAndy (okay, not a Japanese person) who when pronuncing single mora will end up with D, but then goes to R when saying actual words.
Yeah… I give up 
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The way we as human develop most humans start listening in the womb. speaking comes much much later. So the inability to pronounce certain sounds is a result of not being exposed to them in the early years of development. In Japanese there is only r sounds and they are not the r an English speaker uses, from a westerner perspective it’s kinda in between an R and and L (literally between the positions your tongue rest on when you pronounce them) and that’s why there is no distinction between an L and an R because both those sounds belong to the same sound interpretation unit in several asian languages. That’s why the translation of 李さん to English is Mr. Lee, and not Mr. Ree (unless they wanted to avoid mystery…)
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Inability to distinguish is also something that gets decided pretty early, right? I’ve read about experiments done with really young kids about what sounds they can distinguish. (They can’t talk to you, but because babies visibly react to “something’s different!” you can tell whether they hear “lid lid lid lid rid” as “five things that all sound the same” or “ooh, something changed”.) Initially babies can distinguish different sounds regardless of what their parents’ language is, but quite soon they set up those buckets for speech sound categories and stop perceiving different variations within the same bucket as different, even though six months earlier they did hear them as different sounds. (Babies raised in a bilingual environment have buckets for both languages.)
(ことばの発達の謎を解く | L34 is a pop science book on language development in children, which I think is where I most recently read about this.)
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I wonder if I read a translation of this research? I don’t remember when or where I read it, I think it was several papers, but this sounds soooo familiar. I think it was something about not agreeing with Chomsky’s theory among other things, probably more than two years ago…
But yeah it was about that short window of opportunities which also has to do with the amount of neurons babies brains have and the rapid decline of their amount in the beginning it’s all tied up together. And there was one about the difference of development in bilingual kids brains and monolingual kids. There might be a link on my old device… idk.
But I really remember the description of their head movement towards familiar and unfamiliar sounds.
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Thank you, both!
I knew the bit about it being between R and L and where the tongue goes - but it still is baffling to clearly hear them saying either almost-R or almost-L (completely different sounds, to my ear at least) depending on… dunno what it depends on, really 
Of course, that doesn’t get us any closer to somehow quickly resolving the OP’s problem
It happens to me quite often too to not recall whether a kanji in a vocab item has a reading of しゅ vs しゅう or じょ vs じょう (and others).
The only solution I can think of… drill, drill, drill until there’s no more doubt about those readings 
I do use the double-check script for such situations but never for the same reading more than once. If I get it wrong again (I keep track separately), it must be marked as failure and go back however many levels into the review queue. That’s just me
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A lot of people seem to have trouble with つ / す、づ / ず, and ふ in general, and then there’s pitch accent…
In general, I think as an English speaker I there were lots of sounds that I perceived one way, but were actually different. Obviously there’s the R-sound, but even T is pronounced differently to how I initially heard it. It becomes much more obvious when trying to shadow fast Japanese speech because using the English pronunciation I simply can’t move my mouth/tongue fast enough - Japanese pronunciation moves both much less.
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Interesting. As a non-English native:
つ / す - No probs whatsoever, totally different.
づ / ず - Same sound… Wait, are they not the same sound? Then… 
ふ - Seems fine, I pick up either ‘fu’ or ‘hu’ depending on the vocab using it. Unless, of course, there shouldn’t be a difference
pitch accent - I find the userscript here and the built-in pitch indicator at Bunpro extremely useful (the userscript is better because of where and when it shows you the pitch). But that’s more “informational”, as at this point I don’t do any real speaking myself (I know I should talk to myself out loud if not with anyone else, but… oh, well). I do notice that if I try to sound in my head a new word without seeing the pitch info first, I more often than not get it wrong; but it’s generally fine once I’ve heard the correct pronunciation and/or I’ve seen the pitch info.
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づ sounds initially more heavily obstructed by the tongue than ず, to me, when stressed by native speakers. It’s entirely possible the difference disappears in normal speech.
ふ is closer to hu than fu (depending on your accent, I guess) but isn’t really either in standard British English - breathier and more restricted than hu, no fricative toothy fff sound like in fu. Obviously the exact sound will change depending on its surroundings.
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I’m pretty sure any distinction you think you’re hearing is your brain being biased by the fact they’re different kana spellings. The 「づ」「ず」and「ぢ」「じ」pairs used to have distinct pronunciations, but the difference was lost some time in the Edo period, and in modern standard Japanese they are identical. Most of the 「づ」and「ぢ」spellings were cleaned up in the post WW2 kana spelling reform, but a few words kept them where they were clearly the result of rendaku.
Source: eg じ？ぢ？ ず？づ？
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Probably; I’m definitely no expert, and my ears are pretty old now.
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The important thing is not how the sounds may be different pet se, but they are significantly different for Japanese language (that means that it is a distinction the language uses to differentiate meanings and words).
It is, for Japanese language, ad important as a difference as it may be for English the difference between V/W or T/D or R/L…
even if there are lots of languages for which those pairs sound the same are not different enough, in English they are.
Well, in Japanese お and おう are equally important.
If your own language doesn’t make a distinction between short and long vowels it will be hard indeed to learn that ability. But it is a necessary step to learn Japanese.
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There’s also the Japanese sh pronunciation, which I tried explaining the difference to my friends in the past using the following example.
So, officially it’s the ɕ sound, which, from my very limited research, sounds like it’s in-between ç and ʃ
But wtf does all that mean to someone who has no clue of IPA ( 
)
ʃ is the English “sh”, like the “sh” in “she”.
ç is the Japanese “h” in ひ [hi]. An example in English is the “h” in “hue”.
ɕ is in-between that, representing the “sh” in the Japanese し [shi].
So to practice, basically, keep saying “hue”, gradually changing it until you finally end up saying “shoe”, then go back but stop halfway.
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