Phonetically, L and R are made using very similar throat/mouth movements. Japanese uses a midpoint sound only, whereas English (IIRC, most languages) differentiate them into the extremes. You’re right that they are two very different sounds; the Japanese version is a blend.
They absolutely can differentiate them, however. It just takes some practice because they’re not used to doing it, and have to work at saying and listening to the distinction. njtt’s comment is half-nonsense. Nobody “loses” the ability to hear lingual formations. We gain the ability to hone in on the formations most useful in our native language. Japanese haven’t developed this ability. English speakers are going to have a hard time differentiating between declension in Mandarin for the same reason.
My assumption stems from the fact that there are plenty of L names when romanized from Chinese (LING, LEE, etc)
and R names in Japanese (Reika, Reiko, Reimi, etc)
Thai also. The Thai language has both the L and the R sounds. But some confuse the two, especially when speaking another language. I knew one girl who I swear could not say “fried rice.” It always came out “flied lice.” (We kidded her about being careful not to order that if she ever went to the US, heh :D.)
As well, the Thai noodle dish that most people call rat na is often rendered lat na even using Thai letters.
I can’t supply any names or dates, but the following may not be at all anecdotal:
Japanese politician to American politician: “Congraturations on your erection.”
American politician to Japanese politician: “Thank you. When are the next Japanese elections scheduled?”
Japanese politician to American politician: “That is determined by the Japanese Prime Minister- Japanese Prime Minister can have erections any time he wants.”
I wouldn’t know Chinese (whatever that means) if I heard it, but I did study Japanese for a couple years and you’re right about “L” not being a common vocalization of theirs. In the “R” I always heard a simultaneous “LDR” with the L being very subtle. But that Christmas Story scene always bugs me, too for the same reason. There’s really nobody in real life who gives a damn about it though, so you just have to suffer in silence and laugh at the funny Orientals.
My former Japanese teacher referred to the sound as a “flap R”: making an R sound by flapping the tongue off the roof of the mouth, much like you would to make an L sound.
Thai does not have the S sound at the end of syllables, so a lot of Thais simply omit it like that.
But “larb nar”? That’s a new one on me. That almost sounds like lap, commonly spelled larb. That’s not a noodle dish though, but a spicy meat dish from the Northeast. (The correct pronunciation of the noodle dish regardless of spelling is “rat na,” both A’s the A in “father,” the first one of short duration, the second one a bit more drawn out.
Don’t go by the spelling. The “r” in Japanese, as already noted, is not an English “r”, but something between the "l’ and “r” sound. But to American ears, it may sounds closer to “r”.
I also deeply suspect “rotsa ruck” originated with WWII GI’s stationed in Asia. My father used to use it: He picked it up on his college campus in the early 1960’s.
Note that it is a backhanded rejoinder: It is a sarcastic way of saying: “I don’t believe you will ever be successful at doing that” or: “That is a near-impossible task you are proposing.”
It’s called the alveolar tap/flap. Many accents in English have it phonetically, but not phonemically. “Hello muddah/hello faddah” it actually fairly close. The best example I can give (that obviously varies by accent) is the words “Katy” or “Kitty”, in a lot of accents, including mine the “t” in both of those words is an alveolvar tap/flap.
A Japanese friend of mine pointed out that some Japanese have difficulty with “V” and “B” sounds, especially when at the beginning of a word, where we tend to elide into it from the previous word.
The WWII Pacific stories I recall reading mentioned “Lollipop” as a GI password.
There was a god-awful 50’s movie where Shirley MacLaine pretended to be a geisha, and did the same R’s-as-L’s backwards mixup. Velly stupid.
Whereas, I was in Xian (the central area of China, whre the terracotta army is), the driver was listening to the radio during the long traffic jam; I couldn’t understand a word the comedian was saying on the radio, but every word seemed to end in “ur, ur, ur…” (Much like a Canadian fellow I knew with a speech imepdiment). It seemed very similar in Beijing. So I assume (a) regional accents vary quite a bit and (b) most of our assumption of bad Chinese accents comes from the earlier wave of immigrants mostly from the Hong Kong / Cantonese area?
“Lear” is part of my name, and for a while I worked as a liaison between American and Japanese engineers. The closest they could come to pronouncing that was “riru” but they usually simplified it to “ri”. The Japanese have a letter ‘r’ and when they pronounce it (as in the name Mariko) it sounds much more like an ‘r’ than an ‘l’.
I had a friend named Brill who laughed at the trouble Japanese had with her name, given that they can’t pronounce either B or L. “Pariru” was about the closest they came. She was living with a Japanese family (exchange student or something like that) and to teach them to sound a B, she pinched her lips with her fingers, began to vocalize as her cheeks filled with air, and then let go somewhat explosively, which gave them lots and lots of fun. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that she was an exotically beautiful young woman.
I’ve heard just as much transposition of L to R as the other way around. The anecdotal explanation is that they learn to pronounce the R sound just fine, but they can’t hear the difference, so they use them in a pattern that looks pretty much random (though there’s probably a real pattern that nobody has bothered to figure out).
No idea on the origin, but it was one of my dad’s favorite slightly snarky phrases. He was born in 1920 & served in WWII in the New Guinea region, if that’s of any use.
I’m straining my memory here, but I recall my native-Mandarin-speaking college girlfriend saying that L and R do get mixed up a lot because the phonemes don’t map cleanly between English and Mandarin. Unlike Japanese where it’s almost universally L pronounced as R, the mispronunciation for Mandarin speakers is a bit more random and contextual.
