Can Orientals not pronounce Ls or Rs?

Factual Questions
21

Um, I’m not sure what you might be thinking of here. I’m not thinking of a vowel.

The Mandarin “r” of “ren2” or “ri4” is, best as I can tell, a fricative, not an approximant. It’s retroflex, but the lips are unrounded. Thus, it bears only a slight resemblance to the English “r”.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the rounded mid front vowel in German.

The reference to Beijing speech noted above reminded me of the “r” final, which does sound just about exactly the same as the English “r” after a vowel - but this is really a separate sound entirely.

Note that Stephen Pinker’s books tend to simplify a lot, and he basically delivers a pop-science version of some of Chomsky’s theories. These theories are not wholly accepted among linguists.

22

This is true, but as far as I can tell Pinker/Chomsky’s theories explain the question at hand better than anything else. As I mentioned above, Japanese adults who are capable of perfectly imitating the English “L” and “R” sounds have told me that they can’t hear the difference between the two. So the tendency to mix up the two sounds when speaking isn’t simply a pronunciation problem, it’s a problem with distinguishing between them in the first place. I don’t think this could possibly be due to a physical difference in the ear, so it’s got to be rooted in the brain somehow.

This is sometimes very frustrating for Japanese students of English. Everyone in Japan seems to realize that swapping “L” and “R” is a common mistake when speaking (or writing) English. They’re also aware that foreigners often find this very funny. But as hard as they try, most can never manage to hear the difference. They have to rely on memorization to get it right, and even an excellent memory can’t help you when encountering a new word.

23

There’s no ‘r’ sound in Cantonese, but when people speak English here they can manage it just fine.

There’s also no ‘v’ sound, and that does cause some problems - it often comes out as a ‘w’ .

24

This is often very frustrated for English teachers of Japanese students of English. They’re perfectly capable of saying “L” and “R” and in fact they use both quite often. They just do not know when to use each respective sound unless they know the spelling of the word. My wife is Japanese and is capable of nailing the pronounciation if she chooses, but she says it’s usually too much effort to be constantly thinking about the distinciton.

25

There’s no “V” in Japanese either. Japanese English speakers sometimes pronounce it as a “B”, although this is either less common or less obvious than the famous “L” and “R” problem. I notice it more in Japanese words that are derived from English, like “terebi” (“television”), than when Japanese people are really speaking English.

26

My father is married to a woman from Taiwn. They’ve been together for twenty years and she is still unable to say his name correctly. Her pronunciation of Arnold is Ah No. Sometimes she get’s the R’s, but almost never the L’s.

27

But we’ve got to keep fighting the good fight, right? :wink:

*Yeah, and it’s not good enough to just know the spelling in katakana, they have to know it in romaji!

For anyone unfamiliar with Japanese writing systems, katakana is the syllabary often used for transliterating foreign words. It hasn’t got a symbol for every sound in every language on earth though, mostly just the ones found in spoken Japanese. When writing out an English word in katakana, there’s no way to make it clear whether the sound being represented is an “L” or an “R”. In katakana I’d write the first syllable of my username as "レ ", but I’d write it exactly the same way if my username were really “Ramia”. To make the difference obvious I’d have to write it out in Roman letters (romaji), which has the disadvantage of making it less clear how the vowels should be pronounced.

28

I think the OP posted the Oriental thing right in the header just to get a reaction, in some passive-agressive way. Just type “Asian” and spend the 3 seconds to clarify yourself in the post.

Anyways, Mandarin words don’t end in hard consonants (small exceptions). The majority of Mandarin words end in a vowel, -N, or -NG. But even without the Beijing dialect, I’m guessing most people would say they can hear some type of subtle -R ending, in say, “Wo,” which is basically ,“me,” or , “I.” Sounds like, “Wor.” The occasional word like the number two is supposed to have an obvious -R ending sound. The Beijing accent really stresses the -R ending, and sometimes puts it in places other Mandarin speakers don’t, like in the word for door. In pinyin, and with most speakers, you hear, “men.” With the Beijing accent, they change it to, “mer.” And then there’s the infamous, “SShhhhrrrrrrrr ma?” :smack: So anyways, the point is, for Mandarin speakers I’m guessing that’s one reason a Mandarin speaker might turn Arnold into Ah No. No hard consonant ending sounds.

For Cantonese speakers, there is an R sound at the end of the syllable, but not at the front (“ngor,” the Canto version of “wo” is a case in point). So fried rice = flied lice. I don’t think Mandarin speakers have that problem.

I think the Koreans have the same L/R problem as the Japanese. I’ve seen the Korean alphabet, and for that one letter it was listed as both an R and an L. Or was that a K and a G? Sorry, not sure, too lazy to look it up.

And ofcourse, none of my Asian-American friends have any problem with English at all, which puts a huge hole in that OP’s question.

I read something interesting, though. Apparently there’s some Koreans in Korea who are forcing their children to go through this surgery to get the string at the bottom of their tongues cut, so they can pronounce English words better. Creepy.

29

Thank you Excalibre. I don’t know as much about this as you seem to. If it’s not too much of a hijack…

  1. You say ‘simplify’ as if it’s necessarily a bad thing. But it isn’t, is it? Sometimes, the writer who can simplify an idea, while also conveying its merits accurately (and perhaps eloquently), is darned useful. I’ve never read an ecology book in my life, but ‘Last Chance To See’ by Douglas Adams is superb, and gets all the right points across in a way which other book fail to do, in my opinion. I bet we could just as easily be having this discussion the other way around - I might cite an author and you or someone could say, ‘Yeah, but he *complicates * things…’.

  2. Let’s say we accept your points that Pinker simplifies, and he is recycling Chomsky. So, what are you saying? Is he right or wrong concerning what I wrote previously?

  3. Not being antagonistic, but I thought your final sentence was perhaps a little redundant. In any discipline, there are precious few theories that are ‘wholly accepted’ by *all * who work in that discipline!

30

Slightly tangentially to this, I saw a documentary years ago on the subject of language skills. There was a segment featuring Inuit people. The researcher asked an old lady to say the word for (I forget the actual words) “reindeer” and “arguement”. They sounded exactly the same. This was repeated several times, but to us Westerners, it was eaxctly the same word. On the off chance that they were having a joke at our expense, the sounds were analyzed on an oscilloscope. The words were different. It was a very strange experience.

As other posters have noted, all languages have their unique sounds, and one of the reasons that foreigners have problems is that they simply don’t (won’t?) recognise those sounds as part of language. Presumably toddlers don’t have this problem as they simply take everything at face value.

31

As others have pointed out, Asia is a pretty big continent, so typing “Asian” doesn’t clarify much of anything. It’s just the currently accepted politically correct convention in America. It will become just as offensive as “Oriental” as soon as the PC mavens look at a map and figure out that “Asian” actually covers Arab, Indian, and a multitude of other ethnicities who don’t eat noodles or use soy sauce.

32

Sorry if I seemed like a jerk about that. It’s just that I tend to think a lot of Chomsky’s theories, if fascinating (and there’s no debate but that the man himself is a genius) are taken a lot more seriously than they should be. The concept of linguistic innateness is a fascinating one, but in my opinion a lot of what people seem to take as gospel is very much unproven. And the universal/transformative/minimalist grammar crowd doesn’t always support their ideas with thorough evidence in some folks’ views. There’s still just inadequate proof of a lot of the ideas involved in theories of linguistic innateness.

I just wanted to point out that it can’t be taken for granted that he’s correct in what he says. And I have nothing against pop-science writing in itself; I quite enjoy it, in fact - you can’t become a true renaissance man anymore; the world is too complex. So it’s the best route a lot of us have to knowledge outside our fields of expertise.

33

Why do people still stereotype others?? especially based on ethnicity…“is it true that this race of people can’t do this or that race of people can’t do that.”
It’s worth considering that anyone whose native language doesn’t use the romanised alphabet will probably experience difficulty in pronouncing certain roman letters, not because they can’t but because they are used to pronouncing a certain sound in a certain way…example the japanese pronunciation of ‘r’ or ‘l’. Similarly most non-native cantonese speakers will have trouble being understood in hong kong simply because most languages don’t rely on tones to the same extent as cantonese does. Try saying the number 19 in cantonese- “sap gau”…try it in HK and at best you’ll get laughed at, at worst it’ll all end in tears…“sap gau”, depending on the tone, could mean “wank”. Thats not to say foreigners in HK can’t speak cantonese, it just means we dont make the effort to pronounce the sounds properly cos we’re not used to it…same with “orientals”…they pronounce the letter as close as they can using a sound that exists in their native language. If someone speaking a second language concentrates too much on individual sounds then the sentence often sounds disjointed and artificial…better to have sentences flow naturally even if there are a few mis-pronunciations.

34

Didn’t wonjonsoup acknowledge exactly that by saying “…and spend the 3 seconds to clarify yourself in the post”?

35

One of my teachers worked with codes and he said they would just randomly throw in words with lots of l’s and r’s whenever they had to communicate over open frequencies. For instance a flight leader may tell his squad to form a “parallelogram”.

I later worked for a Japanese company and my boss could never get my friend’s name right. Bill would always be Bih. I think he would just leave of the l intentionally so as not to get it wrong. We also had one gentleman from Mexico which makes me wonder how the Japanese do with trilling their r’s since that was something even I couldn’t do without comically over exaggerating the effect.

Right now I have an eighteen month old daughter and I’m amazed at how quickly she can pick up sounds. There are still some she has trouble with but then she will surprise you and repeat whatever you just said verbatim. These can be complete sentences with long streams of phonemes making up words she has never heard before and using sounds that she has trouble with in other instances. It is really quite phenomenal to witness on a day to day basis how much she learns and how much better she can communicate.

36

Many of these languages (Japanes, Vietnamese, Persian, and others) don’t have a sound for “th” either. So it’s common to hear people pronounce the “th” sound as a “t”. This is not to say that they cannot pronounce it, most can. It just takes a lot more effort.

A lot of the problems people have with the “l” and “r” are due to the letter’s position within the word. Most people have no problem with words that begin with these letters, the difficulty comes in when these letters are in the middle or end of the word. I had a Vietnamese friend a few years ago who could not pronounce “heart” and “hurt” differently. She knew the difference (pronunciation wise) between the two, she just couldn’t make them sound different.

37

Quoth WonJonSoup

On Korean tongue-snipping, I would refer you to this thread. Apparently it is done… though with dubious results.

Koreans also have trouble in English with L and R; they have one letter in their alphabet which usually sounds like an L (in Korean), but can, at times, sound a bit like an R… but when they try to speak in English it tends to be a bit, errr, blurry.

Hey! Here’s good fun: when my wife (a native Korean) wakes up, I’m gonna make her say the word “blurry” and laugh until she slugs me! Woo hoo! :smiley:

38

To clear up any possible confusion: at the time that thread I linked to was posted, I was living in S, Korea. Since then, Astrogirl and I have moved to the US and have married. Same girl, same guy, different circumstances… :wink:

39

I have always wondered, and this is from my own very limited experiences, is:

Why is it when an Asian who moves here wants to Americanize their name ( first or last) they pick something like, Elizabeth or Bruce, and have a hard time saying them?

Anyone else notice this?

40

In college I spent a term overseas with a Korean roommate. Two girls in our group were named “Kelly” and “Carrie”, and he could never manage to pronunciate those names differently. I spent most of the term trying to teach him the difference, and while he did show some improvement, he never did get the hang of it.