I’m a tad confused as to whether Orientals can’t pronounce Ls or Rs. You have the phrase “Flied Lice” but also “Engrish”. Am I right in assuming that Japanese can’t pronounce Ls and Chinese can’t pronounce Rs?
Also, how do Thai Koreans Vietnamese & al. pronounce these letters?
The way I remember it from phonology class, a long time ago, is not that they can’t pronounce those letters, but merely that the distinction between l and r is not meaningful in Japanese or Chinese. In some dialects they might say more of an “r”, and in others more of an “l”. “L” and “R” represent at least two related sounds each in most English dialects; all four or more of these sounds are closely related in terms of how and where they are articulated in the mouth. It’s almost as if there’s a spectrum of sounds between ‘l’ and ‘r’.
I work with some Vietnamese and none of them can pronounce my last name. None can seem to pronounce the long ‘a’ sound with an ‘s-t’ following. An example would be the phrase “Basting a turkey at a casting call”. My last name is similiar to basting but they pronounced like casting. A Korean co-worker has no problems with my last name but murders my first name.
I’m going to be the first one to say this, and I’m going to say it gently in hopes that later posters will follow my example and not jump on you too hard: it is, at best, rather dated to refer to people as “Orientals”.
It is also rather foolish to use phrasing that suggests that pronunciation has anything to do with race or ethnicity. You may have observed that Asian-Americans who are native English speakers have no difficulty in pronouncing English words the same way as other native speakers.
Now, as for your actual question, the English “L” and “R” sounds do not exist in Japanese. The closest sound in the Japanese language is one that’s actually somewhere in-between the two. I’ve heard Japanese people say it’s closer to an “L”. It sounds more like a rolled “R” to me though, and when writing Japanese words in English it’s generally transliterated as an “R” (as in “Hiroshima” or “samurai”). To many native Japanese speakers the English “L” and “R” sounds are indistinguishable from each other, although early exposure to English can eliminate this problem.
However, most Japanese students of English just learn to pronounce these sounds by rote practice of the correct tongue and mouth positions. Some become quite good at this; I’ve known people who spoke near-perfect English but who confessed to me that they still couldn’t hear any difference between “L” and “R”. For other Japanese English speakers it may be anyone’s guess whether they’ll come out with an English “L”, English “R”, or Japanese “L/R” sound.
As for the Chinese, I don’t know. I’ve only known a few Chinese speakers of English personally, and most of them spoke English so well that they had very few pronunciation problems at all.
In Thai, an L (law ling) is pronounced like an L. But the disinction between R and L in that language is very fine, and sometimes an L sounds like an R and an R sounds like an L. When speaking English it seems to happen mostly when one of these letters appears in a place that it never would in Thai. For example, there are no combinations of two consonants in a row. So the name Glenda might come out as Grenda, Glenda or Guh-lenda or Guh-renda. Sprite is pronounced Suh-prite. Greg might come out as Gehg, Guh-reg, Glace, or Glayg.
To make it a bit more complex, an L at the end of a word is pronounced like an N. R becomes a T or an L sound at the end of words.
**Lamia **nailed it. Every language has unique sounds. One might as well ask why English speakers can’t differenciate between “r” and “rr” in Spanish.
The real poinst is that all humans are born with the capacity to make the same number of sounds. As you pass thru puberty, though, your brain gets “hardwired” to hear only those sounds you grew up hearing. So, if you don’t imprint a certain vocal sound as a child, you will have a devil of a time hearing or pronouncing it as an adult. Hence the difficulty adults, but not children, have in losing accents. The OP is just one specific instance of an accent.
It’s also worth noting that, for many Americans, speaking languages such as Norwegian entirely correctly will be nigh impossible forever, for the same reason: they have sounds in their language that we simply were not raised to think about or understand. I remember hearing a few years ago that there was a big study that concluded that anyone who didn’t learn to make those specific sounds within the first (however many months) of their life could never really make them, and non-native speakers of Norwegian were at best using modified versions of their own native sounds to try to approximate them.
My understanding is that with at least some sounds, they must be heard by the age of six months for the brain to register the distinction. I believe a Scandanavian guttural was the example, with English speakers unable to differentiate it if they didn’t hear it as infants.
Nice cross-post, fetus! 
(Wasn’t up yet when I started composing mine, but pretty cool coincidence.)
Mandarin Chinese has both “l” and “r” sounds. The Mandarin “l” sounds exactly like the English “l”, as far as I can tell. The “r” is a funny sound that’s only somewhat similar to the one in English, but it’s hard for me to imagine English speakers mishearing it as “l”. But Mandarin doesn’t use consonant clusters at all, so any word in which an “r” or “l” follows a consonant is likely to cause trouble.
To put Lamia’s comment in perspective: some Asians object to being called “Oriental” others do not care. The PC police have seized on the term and love to berate people for using it, gently or otherwise.
I think the Mandarin “r” sound you are referring to is really a vowel. It sounds a little like the German Ö sound.
In Cantonese, there are a lot of Chinese characters with the “L” sound. But try as I can, I can’t come up with a character with a pure “R” sound. So I’d suspect that a person who’s first language is Cantonese (such as many from Hong Kong) might have difficulty with the “R” sound in English. But it can be learned with practice.
I agree that I think it’s overly sensitive to get up on the high horse about this word, but still, in the context of the OP, ‘Oriental’ covers dozens and dozens of cultures, languages, and ethnicities, and is thus woefully inadequate a term in the context of the OP.
I was chatting up a Korean waitress once and we discussed this. Her "R"s sounded a bit like the French R, kinda gurgly. I tried to get her to touch her front teeth behind her lower lip to make an American English R, but she made a godawful gurgling sound instead. I think they make their R from the bacl of their mouths, and we make ours from the front.
Remember: Gojira = Godzilla.
The former being why the term has fallen out of favor and is now…wait for it…considered dated at best.
*Which gives posters with innocent intent yet another reason to avoid using it.
Chinese does indeed have an “r” sound, but it’s not used in a lot of words unless you happen to live around Beijing.
What annoys me is that you ignorant Westerners can’t grasp the sounds romanized by the letter “q”, “c”, “x”, “u” (the umlaut version), and totally murder our beautiful tones. :wally
Excuse me, but how do we know that the OP is even an American? As I remember, in British English, the word “Asian” is normally used to refer to people from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
There is something about this in Stephen Pinker’s superb and eminently readable book The Language Instinct. If I remember correctly, he says that the brain’s ‘wiring’ and set of cognitive priorities changes somewhere around a child’s fifth year. Up until this change, the brain devotes a very high percentage of its resources to language acquisition, absorbing all the language it hears or sees and working furiously to learn the sounds, shapes, patterns and structures involved. After this change, the brain devotes far fewer resources to these tasks and has other priorities. Language skills continue to develop, of course, but at a much slower rate.
There was a company famous for its home language courses that used to supply cassette tapes and now supplies CDs I guess. They used to use the argument that ‘listen and repeat’ was the easy way to learn a language because “hey!, that’s how you did it as a kid, right?!” This argument has many flaws, and one of them is that the infant brain and the adult brain have massively different aptitudes for language acquisition. What was effortless when you were an infant and learning your FIRST language can involve a massive effort when you are older and trying to learn a second language on top of the one you already know.
In college I had a Japanese roommate. She was from Kyoto, to be precise. She had a little trouble with her “r” and “l” sounds but the oddest thing was that in her entire 4 years in America she never could learn to blow a raspberry/Bronx cheer. (Yes, this was vital to her American college experience.) 