Quote:
Originally Posted by Sashimister
This is one of the major areas where romaji-users are destined to fail forever.
Forget the letter R even exists (because the letter R or its sound doesn't exist in Japanese).
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I'm going to be a bit pedantic here, but I want to make a point.
R is merely a symbol. Like many Roman letters, the sound it represents differs from language to language, and sometimes from dialect to dialect, and a language may even use it for different sounds in different words. It would be more accurate to say "forget the English R sound, because it doesn't exist in Japanese".
The Japanese sound transliterated as "r" in romaji is somewhat unique, but it has some resemblance to Spanish single "r", a fact which might help some students. (Personally, I never mastered Spanish single "r" either, and the trilled "rr" has completely escaped me to this day. But it's that experience which taught me that "r" is far from a uniform sound.)