They can obviously make the sounds of both R and L, but they reverse them. (pronounce “R” as “lllll” and “L” as “rrrr”). Is there an explination?
This could be true of people from other asian countries, but I’ve only noted it about Japanese who speak OK English.
No “L” sound exists in Japanese, so borrowed words are given the “R” sound. Speakers learning English that learn the “L” sound are naturally confused on where to use it.
Japanese doesn’t have distinct L and R sounds. It has a single sound that falls between the two.
When Japanese-speakers speak English they tend to use that one sound for both L and R. That means their L’s sound “R-like” and their R’s sound “L-like”.
Pochacco, that’s a great explanation. I’ve tried to put it into words, but that’s nice and succint.
Is this the same as the situation with “b” and “v” for Spanish-speakers?
Also, there’s a random generation factor. Speakers who can make the distinction between an “L” and an “R” still can forget which one it was supposed to be and can pick the wrong one. Or, they will have misheard the sound. People who are first starting out learning English often can’t hear the difference between the sounds, even in words which we think would be obvious, such as “right” or “light.”
In Korean, there is a character (ㄹ) that represents both the English “R” and “L” sound. However, from what I’ve noticed, this symbol is always an “R” if it’s at the begining of a syllable, and an “L” if it’s at the end of a syllable.
So syllables that start with an English “L” sound are awkward and unnatural to a Korean. This causes them to pronounce (and even spell) things like:
Ratrine (latrine)
Fruent (Fluent)
Jol-Ry (Jolly)
And English syllables that end with an “R” sound, are avoided altogether. For instance, words like Harvest will be spelled and pronounced more like “Hawbest”. The “b” and “v” are, of course an issue for another thread.
So, because of this, I can’t think of any time that an “L” becomes an “R”. But pleanty of times where an “R” becomes “L” and where an “R” simply disappears where it wouldn’t exist in Korean.
Someone more knowlegable in Korean may come by to correct something. But this is what I’ve noticed so far.
Let me try that symbol again…
ㄹ
Close, but not quite it. The Korean language does have both the L sound and the R sound in median positions in a word:
사람 sa-ram (person)
한라 hal-la (a place name)
Basically, if the Korean speaker considers the R sound to be a geminate or word-ending, he will realize it as an L. If he considers the R sound to be not a geminate and to also be between two vowels (in 한글, syllables that begin with a vowel are written with a leading ㅇto “carry the vowel”), then he will realize the sound as an R. In the examples I give above, the R in the first word is between vowels; in the second word, the R follows the N, which, due to phonological rules of the Korean language, assimilates to the following sound, the R, thus making it a geminate and then realized in speech as L.
The “R” in your first example is at the begining of the syllable.
Your second example is great, though! I still haven’t learned all those phonological rules. Or why 이름 sounds like “ee Dum” and not so much like “ee Rum”. It’s reminds me of the Rs in some Spanish words - like Mira= Mee Da.
BTW, Monty, are you Korean? Where is 부천 and what do you do?
I should’ve explained that for the first example, the issue is that the sound is considered to be between vowels. It doesn’t matter if it’s at the end of one syllable and followed by a vowel or if it’s at the beginning of a syllble following a syllable that ends in a vowel. Short version: non-geminate {r} between vowels is realized as [r]. By expressing it as “median position,” I guess that made it less clear that I was referring to the sound’s position within the word, not the syllable.
I’m not Korean; however, I have some knowledge of the language going back to 1977 when I began learning it, to include having to learn Chinese characers. I’m nowhere near as good with the language as gobear is. Bucheon is near Seoul. I teach English at a “cram school” in Incheon.
Ah, I see. I tried to have a Korean Dopefest a couple months ago. I don’t think I got a single response. I haven’t been to Incheon in weeks, but I’ve been to Walmido and Muido quite a few times and I went to the last FC Seoul v Incheon game! I think we tied. I try to go to all the FC Seoul games!!
To avoid too much of a hijack: Bear_Nenno, feel free to send me e-mail. It’s in my profile.
Despite the stereotype from Christmas Story and that Seinfeld episode, the Chinese don’t have a problem with “L” interestingly.
They do, however, not have the “v” sound and often replace it with “w” which makes some of them say “wary” instead of “very”, but I’m always just impressed they learned English anyway.
I actually found that I make similar mistakes in Chinese. I have a hard time saying the word “xie” which means “write” or “shoe” or “thank” depending on tone. Instead of the “x” sound in Chinese, I make the “sh” sound. They usually laugh at me like I’m a child.
Anyways, it goes both ways.
No. Spanish has both sounds and both letters. The “b” sound is pretty much the same in English and Spanish, but the Spanish “v” is intermediate between the Enlgish “b” and Enlgish “v”.
A native speaker could probably explain it better, but my experience is as follows: The “b” sound in both languages is made by pressing the upper and lower lips together. The English “v” sound is made by pressing the lower lips against the upper teeth, while the Spanish “v” sound is made by pressing the lower lips against the upper teeth **and **the upper lips at the same time.
Telugu (a dravidian language of south India) has two ‘L’ sounds and two ‘R’ sounds. And as a native english speaker I have very much difficulty distinguishing between the two 'L’s or the two 'R’s.
As a tangent, Telugu also seems to have four ‘T’ sounds, four ‘D’ sounds, and four ‘N’ sounds, none of which i seem to be able to distinguish very well (or at all).
And on the other hand, the ‘W’ and ‘V’ seem to blend together like other languages.
So, i think what it comes down to is that it’s really frickin’ difficult to learn new sounds as an adult.
(Now, i’m a Telugu neophyte, so while i may slightly naive above, the point still stands)
Regarding the Japanese people’s difficulty with L’s, here’s an essay written by a Japanese person about this problem. (This essay was originally written in Japanese for Japanese readers, but is translated into English on this page.)
That’s very interesting to me, as English also has two L sounds.
This is incorrect. The letters <b> and <v> are absolutely equivalent in Spanish orthography. They both represent one phoneme, /b/, which is realized as ** at the beginning of an utterance or after an [m] sound, and as [ß] in all other positions. ** is like an English <b>, while [ß] is a voiced bilabial fricative, which could be described as halfway between ** and [v]: make a ** sound but expel some air between your lips.
It may be that a few border dialects with Portuguese or Catalá maintain some distinction between <b> and <v>, as those languages both do, but this is speculation on my part; I’ve never heard that this is the case.