[zelse]

It's funny, because in Old English ('Anglo-Saxon'), vowel and consonant length are both semantically important.

For those of you who want to have a better handle on the distinction, you can think of it as the sound having an extra 'beat', where a beat is the amount of time pronouncing that sound normally occupies.

It's easier if you take advantage of the one place English still distinguishes this: word boundaries.

Listen how you say, for example: Tibetan nitwit (you're holding the 'n' for two beats because your brain treats the distinction as important /when it's at a word boundary). You can do this with vowels too as an exercise, though they're a bit harder because English has a lot of vowels and finding good matches is a bit difficult.