4 ms·

>Japanese speakers cannot properly learn to distinguish English /l/ and /r/ in later life Not sure I agree with the absoluteness of "cannot" here as I've succ

>Japanese speakers cannot properly learn to distinguish English /l/ and /r/ in later life Not sure I agree with the absoluteness of "cannot" here as I've successfully taught a few Japanese (and a Korean!) to properly enunciate the /l/-based sounds from English. It's simply training your brain to have two new pieces of muscle memory with regard to tongue movement. Learning the Japanese /r/ sound is the same process, although we have it a bit easier than they have it. :) The fact that they try to approximate the English /l/ sounds using their roof-of-mouth-tongue-flicking /r/ sound is a failure of how English is taught in their schools. Every Japanese I've spoken to said their English courses in school had no focus on pronunciation, only on reading/writing, and none of their teachers were native English speakers. As far as tones go, I've been living in Taiwan for about six months and I'm no closer to being able to hear them in everyday speech. I can pronounce them decently though, according to a friend here.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> taught a few Japanese (and a Korean!) to properly enunciate the /l/-based sounds from English You can teach people the physical motions of producing the sound, but that's not the same as acquiring the phoneme. They will have to consciously produce the /l/ and /r/ sounds and will still not be able to distinguish them when listening.
- riffraff 11y ago
  Is there a reason for being unable to tell the difference between "r" and "l" that makes them special? Otherwise, as an italian, I have gone through the motions of learning to * distinguishing long and short vowels in english. Ship vs sheep took me a looong time. * going from ~7 vowels in italian to 14 in hungarian * learning a few more consonant sounds in both hungarian, spanish, and english (I still suck at "h") while I would agree they all still require conscious effort for me to produce them, distinguishing them is not a major issue with enough practice.
  - alphonsegaston 11y ago
    Again, the "cannot" here is probably imprecise. In Japanese, r and l exist as a single sound, making differentiation difficult for the average Japanese speaker in other languages. The original research by a Japanese linguist into this phenomenon in the 70s suggested it was impossible because of the way phoneme and allophone acquisition happens in childhood. But this claim had been mitigated by subsequent research that suggests it is context dependent, as well as less certainty about phoneme vs. allophone distinctions.
- brobinson 11y ago
  Interesting. I'm not a linguist, but when my brain switches into Japanese mode, I can pronounce their R sound in speech without consciously thinking about it. Same thing happens with the /r/ sound in Mandarin (as in "rén"). Hearing them doesn't require any additional effort, though my brain does recognize that they are different from the English equivalents.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

> taught a few Japanese (and a Korean!) to properly enunciate the /l/-based sounds from English You can teach people the physical motions of producing the sound, but that's not the same as acquiring the phoneme. They will have to consciously produce the /l/ and /r/ sounds and will still not be able to distinguish them when listening.

riffraff 11y ago
Is there a reason for being unable to tell the difference between "r" and "l" that makes them special? Otherwise, as an italian, I have gone through the motions of learning to * distinguishing long and short vowels in english. Ship vs sheep took me a looong time. * going from ~7 vowels in italian to 14 in hungarian * learning a few more consonant sounds in both hungarian, spanish, and english (I still suck at "h") while I would agree they all still require conscious effort for me to produce them, distinguishing them is not a major issue with enough practice.
- alphonsegaston 11y ago
  Again, the "cannot" here is probably imprecise. In Japanese, r and l exist as a single sound, making differentiation difficult for the average Japanese speaker in other languages. The original research by a Japanese linguist into this phenomenon in the 70s suggested it was impossible because of the way phoneme and allophone acquisition happens in childhood. But this claim had been mitigated by subsequent research that suggests it is context dependent, as well as less certainty about phoneme vs. allophone distinctions.
brobinson 11y ago
Interesting. I'm not a linguist, but when my brain switches into Japanese mode, I can pronounce their R sound in speech without consciously thinking about it. Same thing happens with the /r/ sound in Mandarin (as in "rén"). Hearing them doesn't require any additional effort, though my brain does recognize that they are different from the English equivalents.