Phonetic Differences
The Japanese liquid is most often realized as an alveolar tap, though there is some variation depending on phonetic context. /r/ of American English (the dialect Japanese speakers are typically exposed to) is most commonly a postalveolar central approximant with simultaneous secondary pharyngeal constriction and lip rounding:, though it may also be a labialized retroflex approximant . /l/ involves contact with the alveolar ridge as well as some raising of the tongue dorsum (velarization), especially when syllable-final.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Speakers Learning R And L
Famous quotes containing the words phonetic and/or differences:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)