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Comment by foobarbazqux | Hacker News Reader

There are five Japanese l/r sounds: ra (raa), ri (ree), ru (roo), re (ray), ro (roe) - sorry, not a linguist. For each of those, if I pronounce them in English, my tongue doesn't touch the top of my mouth. If I pronounce la (laa), li (lee), lu (loo), le (lay), lo (low) in English instead, my tongue moves from top to bottom. Specifically, the tip of my tongue starts by touching the gums behind my front teeth and at some point touches my gums behind my bottom teeth. Whereas in Japanese it touches the front teeth and doesn't touch behind my gums at the bottom.

Is that more clear? I agree that there are other r and l sounds in English, but there aren't in Japanese, there is a fixed set of phonemes. I'm trying to explain how each Japanese l/r sound is clearly split into a different l and r sound in English. Of course, there are many English l and r sounds that are badly approximated by the five l/r sounds in Japanese.

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My Japanese training is very limited (I know the hiragana alphabet, but I'm sure my pronunciation is terrible), so I won't pretend any confidence there. Of course, we both agree that English "l", English "r", and the five Japanese "ra/la" sounds (ら, り, る, れ, ろ), are all different sounds. We all know it's a bad approximation to say that "ら" is "la" or "ra", but it's the best approximation available. (I'm told that whether it's more like "la" or like "ra" depends on where you are in Japan, to some degree). Indeed, this one-to-two mapping problem is so well-known, that there are demeaning "jokes" about saying "lice" when one means "rice", and so on.

Anyway, my point was this: your description of English articulation had some minor errors in it, which I tried to improve upon.

> If I pronounce la (laa) ... in English, my tongue ... at some point touches my gums behind my bottom teeth

That may be true for you, but this is not typical. Or at least, it's not the the "L" that's doing that. If you say "raaaaaaaaa" in English, you'll find that the "aaaaa" noise puts your tongue on the bottom of your mouth just as much as it does for "laaaaaaa".

And if you put your finger on your lower gums, you can learn to say "la lee loo lay low" without your tongue ever touching your finger, much less your gums. Just like how many English speakers curl their tongue to say English "ra ree roo ray roe" but they can learn to leave the tip of their tongue down (with practice).

Well, I'm certain of two things: 1) there is a clear difference between l, l/r, and r and it's easy to say all three if you know what you're doing; 2) I'm doing a bad job of explaining the difference.

I'm pretty sure I know what my tongue is doing in English, but alright it may be due to the vowel instead of the consonant. The problem in Japanese is there's no distinction between vowel and consonant.

Yes, it could be that touching the bottom of the mouth during the vowel part is not as important as the position of the tongue initially. l: relaxed, some sliding, top of mouth; l/r: tighter, as for a rolled r, more forward, top of mouth; r: does not touch top of mouth. loo and roo are both incorrect pronunciations of ru.

The Mexican Spanish "r" is close to the Japanese r/l. You don't say "bulito" or "burr-ito" like a burr of metal. You say "burrito", and know that people who can speak it add a tiny bit of a roll to the "r". The Japanese R is not rolled, but it's like just starting the roll.

This is a nice and concise way to articulate it.

The simple description you'll find in most linguistic descriptions of Japanese is that the Japanese r is what is called an alveolar tap and written as [ɾ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is also the Spanish r in pero (not the trilled r in perro). The reality is more complicated because Japanese only has one liquid phoneme. The fact that there is no separate l sound in Japanese means that there is a bigger phonetic space that the r sound can occupy. What ends up happening is that the Japanese r can be lateralized, that is, part of the airstream is through the sides of the tongue rather than through the middle of the mouth. A lateralized tap which results in this case is written as [ɺ]. This ends up sounding like l, which is technically known as a lateral approximant because the airstream is only through the sides of the tongue.

The more complete description of the Japanese r is that it is a tapped alveolar consonant that can range between a completely central [ɾ] and the lateralized [ɺ], with different degrees of lateralization. All will be interpreted as the Japanese r, and speakers tend to use [ɾ] after vowels, with lateralization likely to creep in if the r comes at the beginning of an utterance or after an n.

I'm a native speaker of Korean by the way, and while at the abstract phonemic level we also have a single l/r sound represented as ㄹ in the Korean alphabet, we do distinguish [ɾ] and [l] between vowels. 아리 ari uses the tap [ɾ] and 알리 alli uses [l] because that's how double ㄹ is pronounced. It's a similar distribution to the tapped and trilled r's in Spanish, where trilled r's between vowels can be analyzed as double r's.

Thanks for the thorough explanation. IPA seems useful, like the kind of thing schools should teach, but it also scares me with its complexity.

I can't speak Japanese, but I've studied it enough to be able to read a little bit. My first Japanese book referred to it as the "tapped R" for exactly this reason.

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