So I thought I'd have a swing at this. This week I attended a lecture where the speaker in attendance insisted that Mandarin speakers had problems distinguishing between the English "R" and "L" consonants.
Now we all know the stereotype that East Asian speakers seem to have problems with Rs and Ls ("it's fried rice - you plick!"), but I'm a native (well, reasonably native) speaker of Mandarin and that didn't really sit well with me.
I knew for certain that there is a clear distinction between R and L in Mandarin. For example words like day/日/ri, hot/热/re, easy/容易/rongyi all have Rs in them (pronounced a little rolled - more on that later - but nonetheless an R) and words with Ls like road/路/lu, old/老/lao, cold/冷/leng, so on and so forth. I mean these are not even exceptions: literally hundreds of ideograms and tens of thousands of compounded words with distinct L and R consonant sounds.
So it was off to Google, and surprisingly, I found many non-native speakers writing about this topic, but not many native speakers bothering to chime in or defend/build the case. Maybe they couldn't be bothered, but in reading the comments it was like asking a biology teacher to help you with your history assignment. Yeah, pretty much.
Anyway, with some research and with armed with my native Mandarin and Cantonese (and rudimentary Korean), I thought I'd try to debunk this myth, or at least shed some light on it.
Here's what I found.
Mandarin
So... firstly, the largest language group (nearly a billion speakers) - Mandarin. As I've pointed out, yes, Mandarin speakers can indeed distinguish the R and L sounds (yay me!).The way I learned Mandarin (in Singapore), the R is rather flatly pronounced - not unlike an English R but softer. However some may insist that Beijing Mandarin is the "correct" accent, in which case Mandarin spoken around the native regions have a sort of "y" sound before the r.
They also seem to have more of a "翘舌音"/qiaosheyin (rhotic or "rolled tongue", but I like "curly tongue" heh) in the Beijing/Northern accent, which means they tend to run off words with that damned R sound when none is called for.
Anyway, you can do a search on the internet - I did, and there seems no consensus on how it should be pronounced exactly (some say like a Polish "rz" - whatever).
But it matters not - the fact is that L and R are distinct and don't get muddled in Mandarin.
Or do they?
It seems that Mandarin speakers do run into trouble with consonant clusters containing Ls and Rs. So words like "flight" become "fright" if they aren't paying attention to their speech. Here, I think northern Mandarin speakers will tend to shed a "l" and prefer an "r".
Also, while they can definitely pronounce an L in the beginning or middle of a word (where not compounded with other consonants), Mandarin speakers find it hard to end a word with "L".
Now, they have no trouble ending a word with R - in fact, with the rhotic roaming R, they would prefer to end words with R.
So a sentence like "ball feel real deal meal" may present problems for native Mandarin speakers. (ok they're not really going to say that)
However all this means is you would never get "flied lice" from a Mandarin speaker, and would be unlikely ever called a "plick" either.
Cantonese
Cantonese has about 80 million speakers and happens to be my first language and my mother tongue, but alas, we have no "R"s in Cantonese.So guilty as charged, the Cantonese cannot pronounce R. (Interestingly they also tend to switch between "L" and "N" on some words within Cantonese itself, but this is likely not something that carries over to English words.) But there is no mix up between Ls and Rs - there are simply no Rs at all.
So in Cantonese you would always be called a "plick" and you would always have to eat those little blood-sucking critters a-la-"flied".
They would however, have no problem whatsoever singing "la-la-la" in a refrain from any song that requires you to bust out some "la-la-la"s.
Korean
I'm going to invoke my rudimentary Korean and knowledge now. (bzzzzzt shazam)
Well Koreans can actually pronounce Ls and Rs too! But to show you how messed up it is, they only have one letter in their alphabet to represent the two sounds. (further to that, they also don't have F, replaced either by P or a HR sound. Sometimes I'm not sure if I really have to pay a "fee" or a "pee". Well, I couldn't give a puck, even if I had one handy).
It's so unstable that South Koreans with the surname "Lee" (리) have dropped the rieul and renamed themselves (이), pronounced "Yi". It's sort of like dropping the J from Jones to become Mr Ones. Pretty drastic if you ask me.
In North Korea, though, they still maintain the rieul in that surname, so their surnames remain (리), and it's often romanised to be "Rhee" or "Ri".
But in any case, they have Ls and Rs and perhaps sometimes can be cause of much confusion because they'll invoke one consonant when they mean the other.
It could be "fried lice", or "flied rice" depending on their mood and time of day. Oh and Koreans can also "la-la" all day long at their favourite 노래방 (noraebang).
(But it still doesn't make Kim Jong-Il less ronery in Team America.)
Japanese
Admittedly Japanese is the language I know least about (despite having done 3 months of it in high school).
But what I do know is that unlike Korean, Japanese doesn't have the English "R" or "L" sound. They have the Japanese "R" which is something in between, somewhat an alveolar tap (as in the Korean rieul).
The difference in Japanese is that all R and L English consonants are pronounced this way, so without (re-trained) effort, Japanese speakers would likely pronounce all Ls and Rs this way, much like how everything in Cantonese is an L, except in Japanese all Ls and Rs are pronounced with that "in-between" alveolar tap R.
They would thus indeed have trouble singing "la-la-la"s. It'd be more like "ra-ra-ra". And to think they invented karaoke.
Other Languages
I've covered some East Asian languages here (don't know about the other Chinese dialects/topolects, but I suspect if they speak Mandarin, it would be the same kind of tongue acrobatics involved) but I think some other languages, like Thai, also confuse R & L. That was out scope for my research.
Some Closing Thoughts
Now remember that speakers of these Asian languages can actually hear and distinguish "R" and "L" when spoken to them. It's just that when they are speaking English, unfamiliar/weaker muscles are put into play that cause the mouth to pronounce the English consonant(s) using their native counterparts instead.
I guess what is happening is that late learners of English tend to focus on the spelling of the word rather than the sound (remembering the mnemonic - the writing - rather than the sample - the soundbyte - requires less brain effort) and thus try to pronounce/process the sound via the spelling.
In the case of Korean, for example, it makes matters worse for native Korean speakers because there is only one character which represents two sounds that switches upon context.
If they were to focus on the sound (rather than the spelling) they were trying to make there would likely be fewer errors (though a little speech muscular training would still be required).
In the case of Korean, for example, it makes matters worse for native Korean speakers because there is only one character which represents two sounds that switches upon context.
If they were to focus on the sound (rather than the spelling) they were trying to make there would likely be fewer errors (though a little speech muscular training would still be required).
So there you have it. Hopefully I've shed some light on the subject - if I've made any errors, please feel free to add your comments!
