an example of my progress

Last night I spent time at work in this Auditory Therapy site in CiHear.com under the link, "American English Pronunciation Practice."

These are an example of the words I was trying to decipher:

van/fan (I found this hard)
very/ferry (hard, again!)
safe/save (Phew, this was easy)
leave/leaf (Ah, ok, I got this)
lice/rice (I got 12 guesses right, and 2 wrong. I found it challenging, but am starting to recognize the R...)
low/row (8/2)
long/wrong (7/3)
shout/shot (6/4 - I started out weak but improved at last half)
cloud/clod (6/4)
pound/pond (5/5)
pout/pot (9/1)
these/z's (10/0)
breathe/breeze 10/0
clothing/closing 10/0
rhythm/risen 10/0
said/sad 5/5 (mostly guessing - I thought this would be easy.. not so!)
guess/gas 6/4

By this time I'd had enough. It was fun trying without any lipreading cues. This is excellent practice as I have no context of sentences to support my understanding.

Also, this week, I noticed that women's voices were sounding more fluid. Initially I found male voices easier to hear and their voices rich with bass. I found women's voices irritating (I say this with a sheepish grin) as the high frequency pitches in a female voice sounded raspy to me. The auditory nerve does take time to settle. This is so interesting to me because previous to the implant I preferred female voices for understanding. I take great pleasure in listening to anybody now! No more seclusion nor isolation - I am ready to take on the world!