Asian languages have neither the English R (tongue curled backward in mouth, sides curled upward relative to mouth; "retroflex approximant") nor L (tongue strai

Asian languages have neither the English R (tongue curled backward in mouth, sides curled upward relative to mouth; "retroflex approximant") nor L (tongue straight, sides curled downward; "lateral alveolar approximant"). Rather, they have an R which is a combination of these (tongue straight, sides curled upward; "alveolar approximant"). Without a native sound to map these two distinct sounds to, it's easy to confuse them. I've definitely seen foreigners confuse TH and T in writing. TH is very often pronounced (and therefore sometimes likely misremembered) as T. TH and T a more distinct than R and L however; TH is fricative (has duration), T is plosive (instantaneous). What's more common is for foreigners to confuse our sundry vowels. I count at least 14 distinct sounds. Many foreign languages have only 5. But since we have only 5 written vowels, we notice less when a foreigner uses the wrong vowel (and brush it off more as an accent). English speakers confuse u and ü in German; ㄱ (k), ㅋ (kh), and ㄲ (kk) in Korean (heck I know phonetics and I can't get these right); e and é, and gender in French (quick, where do the accents go in "resume"?). Chinese speakers confuse second-person pronouns in English. Japanese confuse green and blue. There are a ton more examples of such confusion; they're all due to our minds mapping information based on our native tongues.