Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing "L"?


Why is it that native speakers of Japanese have a hard time pronouncing "l"?
Whenever a western word contains "L" I see that they pronounce it "ru", "ra",
"ro", "ri", or "re".




If you ask a Japanese person to say a word like renraku fast, and then
gradually ask them to say it more and more slowly, you will notice that what
initially sounded like an r becomes an l as they slow down (usually earlier on
for women). So the claim that l and r don't exist is simply wrong -- they both
do, but as variants (allophones) of the same sound (phoneme).

If you tell them that they first said an r and then an l, you will surprise
the heck out of them as they usually have no idea about this and will probably
be unable to tell the difference. The reason is fairly simple: it's the same
sound in Japanese. The only difference between the Japanese l and the Japanese
r -- not the English r, which is quite different -- is mostly the duration of
the contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth and while this
feature allows the two sounds to be distinguished in European languages, it is
NOT a distinguishing feature in Japanese.

Similarly, English speakers fail to distinguish many sounds. Some languages
have nasal vowels (French, Portuguese, Polish, etc.): when the soft palate is
lowered to allow air to pass through the nose as a vowel is produced, it
changes a vowel to a nasal vowel and this is a distinguishing feature -- but
not in English. So in a word like bank, the a is nasal because it is following
by a "ng" sound, and if you ask English speakers what vowel is it, they'll say
it's an a, while for a speaker of Portuguese, it's a nasal vowel, not an "a".
Another example is how English t, p and k sounds are aspirated (there is a
puff of air) at the beginning of words or between vowels, but not after an s,
for instance. English speakers usually have no idea about this, but in other
languages, such as Korean, aspirated and unaspirated t's are two very
different consonants. So if you want some insight into how it feels to not
tell l and r apart, ask yourself why you, as an English speaker (if you are),
can't distinguish nasality or aspiration.

So the first problem is that Japanese people have a hard time hearing whether
an l or an r is being produced because they are two possible realizations of
the single phoneme to them, and consequently, they have a very difficult time
remembering which is which. You'll find the same thing with z/dz. Ask a
Japanese if you should say zettai (with a z) and they'll say yes. Ask again if
it's dzettai (with dz) and they'll also say yes. Ask which they prefer and
they'll tell you they only heard one pronunciation, even though you clearly
said z in one case and dz in the other.

To make matters worse, they start out learning English using the wrong kind of
flapped r (as in Spanish or Italian), while the English r is not flapped, but
is rather a retroflex r where the tongue is curled back and doesn't touch any
part of the mouth. To make matters even worse, the way English words are
borrowed into Japanese interferes with their perception of English words, ie.
they are spelled in a way that doesn't distinguish l and r (love=rabu), final
r's are turned into a's (computer=kompyuutaa), etc. They really need to stop
using katakana transcriptions. Note also that the English r involves lip-
rounding, but since this isn't used in Japanese -- and they start learning to
pronounce English without ever using lip-rounding -- they fail to see this as
an important feature of English r.

The second problem is that even if they remember which is which, production is
very difficult because the brain is used to treating both sounds as one, and
they usually spent a fair bit of their lives as learners of English in a
context where you simply said l and r the same and that's how everyone did it.
It's a bit like relearning to walk after an injury.

So, while it's true that some Japanese people have a difficult time saying the
English r, most can usually make l and r in isolation once they've understood
how the sounds work. The biggest problem is that they have a hard time telling
l and r apart when hearing it in speech, remembering whether a given word
actually has an l or an r (and they often misspell words containing these
sounds), and then producing either sound with regularity is ultimately the
most difficult exercise.

One final note: to make it easier to explain, I left out some details. For
instance, the English l is sometimes curled and English l and r are sometimes
devoiced (compare ray and pray). These are small details that also make the
sounds harder to produce accurately.

