What makes it hard for native Japanese speakers to differentiate between "L's" and "R's"?

Question

I have some Japanese friends at college, and have noticed that they mix up "r's" and "L's" quite frequently. i was wondering if anybody out there understands why that is.

Please no racists jokes, serious answers only.

Answer 1

In Japanese there is no hard R sound, For them the closest thing to an R or L sound actually falls somewhere in between for them. Most have a hard time hearing the difference let alone saying it. For them, lingusitically it makes no difference. Lock and rock sound exactly the same to them.

It's kind of like languages that have tones in them, most English speakers can't hear the difference because we haven't been trained to tell the difference. Same with Japanese.

Answer 2

Koreans do it too. My guess (and it's a guess only) is that they don't really have different sounds in their languages for "l" and "r" (they're called liquids). They just have a liquid consonant (I'm pretty sure that this is true in Korean, but I'm not at all sure for Japanese). Whether the liquid consonant sounds like an l or an r seems to depend on what consonants or vowels are clustered around it. Hence, when they encounter those same clusters in English, they sometimes make a mistake as to which liquid to use. Hope that's helpful, and I apologize if I'm way off.

Answer 3

It has to do with their native language. When you spend years and years speaking a language that doesn't have an L, your tongue loses the ability to be able to properly form the motions needed to speak words that have L in it.
If you pay attention to how they talk for other words, I'm sure you'll notice a difference between their pronunciation and the majority at your school. I notice it especially for words that begin with A where the letter is more often than not pronounced as it is in "apple" and not like it is for other words (such as anger).

There's also plenty of sounds English native speakers cannot do (or cannot do well) because our tongues simply are not used to it and has grown far too accustomed to the English way of speaking words.

Answer 4

This is kind of hard to explain, but I'll do my best!

In English, "r" and "l" sounds are different phonemes--a phoneme is the smallest part of language that can show a difference in meaning. For example, the "b" and "c" sounds in "bat" and "cat" are different phonemes, which is why bat and cat are two different words with distinct meaning.

In Japanese and Chinese, the "r" and "l" sounds are not different phonemes. In these languages, you would not find a pair of words like "rot" and "lot" with different meaning--that would just be different pronunciations of the same word. It's kind of like short and long vowel sounds in English; some people pronounce "aunt" with the long "a" and others pronounce it "ant". Hope that helps!

Answer 5

we simply don't have the exact L and R sounds pronounced in english.
if your japanese friends at college had never seriously practiced pronouncing any english words with L and R while in their youth, they have to work really hard to aquire those sounds. it's been said that a person's ears and facial muscles would complete it's growth around the age of 18, and that makes a person difficult to produce new sounds other than the familiar language.

Answer 6

Because there is no distinction between R and L sounds in Japanese.

In my experience, both sounds (or something similar) do exist; they are simply not distinguished. We don't hear the difference, and we can't pronounce them differently (unless pretty well trained to do so.)

The same reason the average French cannot hear or pronounce 'H' sound, I guess.

Answer 7

they do not have an L in their language. They really dont have an R like we do eaither, they extend their tounge further in theie mouth then we do to make the R sound almost as if to make an L. They cannot hear the diffrence either, since its not modeled in their language. THey can tell the diffrence as infants, before the language speaking process begins.

Answer 8

Just like a lot of Americans unable to pronounce "u" correctly in French because such sound doesn't exist in English. When a sound doesn't naturally exist in your native tongue, you must make a conscious effort to say it.