I work in an aerospace corporation in China and I have gone through lots of business negotiations with officials and executives from abroad. Most of them are impressed with my pronunciation, but I still want to get better.
I wonder if a native speaker can easily hear the difference between ŋ and n. I always pronounce ŋ the same way with n.
Yes, native speakers can tell the difference.
But, Mandarin has both of these sounds:
/ŋ/ is the sound that is written with ng in Pinyin (e.g. at the end of 龙/龍 lóng).
/n/ is the sound that is written with n in Pinyin at the beginning of syllables (e.g. at the start of 南 nán). In some places in China, this is also the sound at the end of 南; in other parts of China, n is pronounced as a nasalised vowel when it comes at the end of a word.
So if you can speak Mandarin, you can surely say both of these sounds.
Yes, a native speaker can hear the difference between /ŋ/ and /n/.
Of course, depending on the context, they may (automatically) ignore it, if one doesn't make any sense.
The sound in sin (/n/) is not the same as the sound in sing (/ŋ/).
If you're pronouncing this the same way:
http://www.pronuncian.com/Lessons/Default.aspx?Lesson=19
When you pronounce /n/ as in sin, kin the tip of your tongue is at the t-point of your palate above the teeth. When you pronounce /ng/ as in sing or king your mouth is opened wide, your tongue is not raised , your throat is wide open as in a long /a:/ and when pronouncing /n/ or /ng/ some of the airstream passes through the nasal cavity.
Wikipedia has an article about Velar Nasal, but I find it totally confusing. In any case you can pronounce the sound /ng/ alone and hold it in the same way as you can hold the pronunciation of a long /a:/ . When you pronounce /a:/ your throat is wide open and the airstream passes without any hindrance. When you pronounce /ng/ you have a narrow passage in your throat, but I can't describe how it is done. I hoped to find something useful about the articulation of /ng/ on the Internet, but I did not find anything useful.
Edit: Here's another video about /ng/. Perhaps it helps. For me this demonstration is didactically helpless. She talks a lot, but you see nothing. But as it seems, the back of the tongue seems to form a narrow passage in the throat. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhTSVdjVf14
Edit 2: Now I have found a diagram of the tongue position.The tongur is draw babck a little to form the narrow passage in the back of the mouth cavity.
I studied the problem in front of the mirror. The room back in your mouth can be open, you see the uvula above the back of the tongue, eg when you say aaa. When you say g, the back of tongue goes up pressing against the uvula; you get a feeling for this movement of your tongue when you say several times aaa g aaa g aaa g. When saying g one can get a feeling for the occlusion produced by the back of the tongue. Say the g slowly and softly, then one can feel the occlusion back in the mouth. When saying ng the tongue makes a similar movement as in g. Try to say g ng g ng g ng. Perhaps this way you get a feeling for the things that happen in the back of the mouth.
