The tongue definitely has to touch the alveolar ridge.

The key's in the flap:mtongue:

Definitely not

The majority of my tongue goes up there (ooer), but the tip doesn't.

Honestly, just pronounce them as Ls.


When I was studying in Japan, it boggled my mind when people years deep in studying Japanese still pronounced the らりるれろs with an R sound.

Next time you say something like れんらく (renraku) just say "Lenlaku." Honestly. If you try to perform some of these other suggestion of meeting some medium point between both the L and R pronunciations, you'll just look like you're trying too hard and it wont be natural.

Best of luck.

That all depends on how they pronounce their L's :p
If they pronounce L's anything like me then saying 'Lenlaku' won't sound even remotely like the original word.

Besides, the point is to just take advice and suggestions and practise until it does sound natural anyway, so by the time your used to it, it hopefully won't sound like your trying too hard.

Although when I speak with pen pals from Japan over skype I can hear them trying very hard to pronounce L and R in some cases, but I know that it's not their first language and they are just practising, and I'm guessing that most Japanese people would probably think the same if it looked like a foreigner was trying hard to pronounce their language in the correct way.

Basically what I'm saying is, in my opinion it's better to look like your trying too hard at risk of sounding un-natural, than to not try at all and going through daily speech without even trying to pronounce it the correct way in the first place.

If you practise every day, saying words and sentences with らりるれ or ろ in them, you will eventually just get used to it.

I kind of agree with you. Start with the L sound rather than the R first. If you're a serious enough learner, your らりるれろ will only get better as your progress.

When I first started learning English in grade 7, I had more difficulty producing the R sound than the L. The same went for nearly all my classmates. This fact should give you a clue, I hope.

Then again, as a native speaker of Japanese, I know for sure that we don't really pronounce らりるれろ as lalilulelo in any natural setting. But for a start, you've gotta replace some sounds by the ones you CAN produce from your native language. This happens to everyone studying a foreign language. You cannot afford to allow one consonant bog you down.

The real sound may technically be found between L and R. But I feel it pretty useless to explain this consonant by how close to or how far from R or L to someone who recognizes R and L as completely different sounds.

^Exactly. Just use Ls, listen to natives and then mimic them the best you can with an L sounding lead. You'll eventually get there. But trust me, any English L sounding　らりるれろ will sound extremely better and more native than any R sounding らりるれろ.

It's sort of a flipped 'r' sound. More of a mix of l and d, to my ears.

Like has been said, listen to native speakers and do your best to mimic it.

I agree with this. IMO it's much better to sound like you are trying than to sound like you're confident with lalilulelo. This reminds me of someone in my class who thinks his Japanese is amazing because he took it in high school; when he was talking to these exchange students that came in our class he just sounded arrogant because he would say something completely wrong but act as if he had a native accent. As long as you're humble and apologize for how terrible your Japanese is, you'll be fine.

@Lucas89, I don't know how you pronounce "lenlaku," but the way I pronounce it using an American accent, it comes pretty darn close to correct Japanese pronunciation.

Either (1) I pronounce "lenlaku" with a weird American accent or (2) I've attained such mastery of Japanese that "l" and "r" are no longer a minimal pair for me.

So I second those above who have said to start with an "l"—I think that's very useful advice upon reflection. It's certainly better than my "blend a 'd' and an 'l'" advice!

I just tried it again.

It's probably more to do with the fact that if I'm deliberatly pronouncing an L sound I can't help but pronounce the rest of the word in my normal way.

I still have the same problem with some katakana English words, sometimes I just forget that I should just pronounce them the way they are written in katakana just end up pronouncing them how I would normally.

But then again I've never pronounced らりるれ or ろ using an R sound, so I've never had to do anything like pronouncing an L sound, because as soon as I started learning Japanese I could kind of roll my R's and stuff like that anyway, so I just practised at that from the offset.