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I recently started learning Mongolian and I'm having trouble with phonemic vowel length. I have great difficulty distinguishing long and short vowels both in listening and speaking. I find it substantially harder than learning tones in Mandarin, which I never had much trouble with.

Does anyone have tips for a native English speaker learning a language with phonemic vowel length? How can I force my brain to acknowledge the difference between long and short vowels?

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    I don't know anything about Mongolian, so I'm not going to post an official answer. But a good strategy for learning how to differentiate vowels and vowel length is to get a lot of audio (single words is fine at first), preferably organized by vowel or vowel length, and compare them. Lots and lots of listening to different words will help train your ear.
    – AML
    Jan 25, 2021 at 18:40

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