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When you said to a lady next to you, "Shall I bring your bag, ma'am?", a guy behind you said "Thanks, man!"
Have you ever had such a experience?
No confusion?
I know the last sound of each of them is different but I, a non-native speaker, don't think that I can definitely distinguish these two sounds in fast talking.
Can you, native speakers, distinguish them however fast they are spoken?
Calling someone "man" is extremely informal, while referring to a lady as "ma'am" is an overtly polite usage - so, one would take the clue from the proceeding word/words:
"Hey, Man" - "Good evening, Ma'am"
"S'up, Man?" - "Can I help you, Ma'am?"
"Yo, Man, that what you pushin' these days?" - "Excuse me, Ma'am, is this your car?"
The key word is context.
If you just say either of these two words, without context, many people may be confused as to which of the two you mean.
However, in context, this will rarely happen, because man is highly informal, both as a form of address, and certainly as an interjection, whereas ma'am quite formal.
For example, the interjection man would never be used together as ma'am like this:
Man, it's hot! Can I offer you a cold drink, ma'am?
When you use man to address someone, it's also informal:
You wanna cold beer, man?
* You wanna cold drink, ma'am?
Could I offer you a refreshment, ma'am?
* Could I offer you a refreshment, man?
The second and fourth variants are unlikely to be spoken by native speakers, because they mix different levels of formality. So in practice, the context will make the listener understand which of the two is meant.
Whenever words are used in context, confusion doesn't happen that often, though. For instance, the d and the b can sound very similar, but nobody will think that
The dog barked in the dark night.
actually is supposed to be
The bog darked in the bark night.
Even though bog and bark are existing words!
I'm sure that many words that are not normally confused for each other could be confused if the speaker says the word quickly, if the surrounding environment is noisy, etc. So I wouldn't say that native English speakers NEVER confuse "ma'am" with "man", but it is certainly not a common problem.
Native speakers of British English pronounce ma’am as /mʌm/ and use it only to address the Queen. So there is no danger of confusing it with man /mæn/ on this side of the Atlantic.
I suspect that the reason that this is difficult for the Original Poster, is that as in many other languages, there is no syllable final contrast between /m/ and /n/ in Japanese. Notionally, the nasal consonant at the end of Japanese syllables in thought of as an 'N'. In fact in everyday speech the /n/ at the end of Japanesse syllables will merely be realised by a nasalised vowel.
This is also true, for example, of many Spanish speakers. There are no Spanish words that end with the letter 'M'. The only nasal consonant that we see in the orthography is 'N'. In spoken Spanish, therefore, many words will be pronounced with either an /n/, an /m/, or with /ŋ/ (the sound represented by 'NG') at the end of the syllable. This does not matter in Spanish, because there are no pairs of words that can be confused with each other because of a difference between /n, m,/ or /ŋ/.
Because of this, Spanish speakers will often produce the wrong nasal at the end of an English word. So, we might hear /taɪn/ for the word time. They also sometimes find it difficult to distinguish /n, m, ŋ/ at the ends of words too. Japanese speakers often also mispronounce words ending in /n/ either by missing the actual /n/ out altogether and replacing it with a nasalised vowel, or by replacing it with /m/ or /ŋ/. They can also have problems hearing which nasal is being used at the end of a word, although it's easier if there's a following vowel.
For these reasons it is often difficult for speakers of other languages to distinguish the nasal consonants at the end of a spoken word, particularly if not followed by a vowel.
To make things even worse, it's also a fact that /n/ is very unstable in English - though /m/ and /ŋ/ aren't. What this means is that /n/ tends to undergo a process of assimilation when appearing before another consonant. So before bilabial consonants (those using the lips), it tends to become bilabial too, changing to /m/. In front of velar consonants (made at the back of the roof of the mouth) it becomes velar too, changing to /ŋ/. Before dental consonants (made with the tongue and the teeth) it also becomes dental, although in this case it is still recognised as an /n/.
What this means is that if the Original Poster heard the following:
This may well actually have been pronounced:
In oother words the /n/ in man will tend to change to /m/ before a following bilabial /b/.
