Have trouble pronoucing らりるれろ,,, please help
 

Friend told me that らりるれろ are neither R sound nor L sound, how should I pronounce these 5 sounds?

Where should my tongue posit? Do I close my teeth?

Any tutorial video would be helpful thx~

Japanese people are hard to find "L" and "R".

Usually, they seems to pronounce らりるれろ as La Li Lu Le Lo.

You can listen to らりるれろ by native Japanese here on Youtube.

YouTube - 改造　スネークの通信「大佐のらりるれろ３」

Don't ask me what they are talking about.

Umm I believe it's an R sound, but native speakers pronounce it (imo) sort of like a T...I would definately wait for others to reply, because I am very unsure myself, but that's my 2 cents

This was the best explanation I found:

How do you pronounce Japanese r?

Because Japanese people does not recognize L and R, らりるれろ can be preonounced somewhere between L and R.

Though I don't know how Japanese pronounciation is tought in the Japanese classes, the teacher should decide either of L or R.

When Japanese people learn English, pronounciation of R is emphasized to use the tongue. This is the reason why I believe らりるれろ is LaLiLuLeLo.

My Japanese class didn't teach how to make the sound; we were expected to hear it and eventually mimic it. Very few were able to actually do that.

I'm a fan of using linguistics to explain things, and I also like using analogies to what we have in our native languages (English for me).

For linguistics-minded people, Japanese phonology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia They are all basically alveolar flaps, which means you flap your tongue against your alveolar ridge, which is the roof of your mouth where it is bumpy about 1cm behind the teeth, right before your mouth opens up into a wider cavern.

In English, the only alveolar flap I can think of offhand that we have is the "tt" in words like "better" and "butter."

らりるれろ is a little different, but it's close enough. It's definitely the closest you'll get when explaining purely with characters on a screen.

Personally, I've just always thought of it as a blend of "d" and "l."

I remember when I asked that question.

"Sensei, is it ra[something] or la[something]?"

And all I got for an answer was a blank stare. Is it A or is it A? Japanese people don't really hear any difference between our r and l. They just kinda know that we get it wrong :rolleyes:

You might want to click the link in my signature for all the r-l audio you will ever need.

i pronounce it RLA RI RLU RLE RO

り and ろ sound stronger to me than the rest so they just get an R sound rather than a mix of the above.

I can clearly pronounce R and L in different way when I could remember the spelling correctly.

However, it does not mean I can distinguish R and L in listening.

One day in London, I had heard the tube announce saying "Next station is Edgware Road" and understand what R shoulde be pronounced (and forgot it).

I would imagine everyone finds a way that works best for them, but this is pretty close to the way I do it, except that my tongue does not touch my alveolar ridge when saying ら, り, る, れ or ろ.

Consider it like squeezing the end of a hosepipe: The water is suddenly pushed out at higher pressure because you're restricted the passageway. ら, り, る, れ and ろ are like this - constricting the airflow with your tongue pushes your breath out faster, and the "flap" will come naturally.

The best thing you can do is listen to examples and practice, over and over again, until it comes naturally to you.

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.

I little off topic and my apologies to the OP as I can't read Japanese.

My 2.2 yearl old son is going through a current learning to talk, repeat-repeat-repeat phase.

One word that has him stumped is 'Moth'. He just cannot get the 'th' tongue between teeth connection and pronounce 'Moff':mtongue:

Super cute but it's driving me nuts!

Just keep correcting him every time he does it. He'll learn by watching you.

Hahaha... Thanks Troo.. I do it often.hehehe:) :)

he's at the talk after EVERY single word Daddys says stage..SUPER cute:)

*Laughs* Awesome.

Just remember, kids need consistency if they're to learn. If you only correct him 50% of the time he'll try to see why he's only wrong 50% of the time, and if he fails to determine a pattern (which he will, because I doubt you manage to correct the same words every time) he'll decide you are being unfair and start ignoring that correction ;)

I say it dra dri dru dre dro.

Don't emphasise the r too much though. Just slightly....

But there's no d in them...

Maybe it is just me, but it seem like pronouncing certain words (like 料理) would sound really strange. Lyoli? Dyodi also sounds weird, but not as strange as lyoli.

It's just how native people say it. (It's a soft d sound)

Depending on a vowel and semivowel, the Japanese "r" can prounce like:

1. alveolar flap-like
2. alveolar approximate (more fronted initial "r" prounciation in North American English)

If you insist. I, however, shall continue to pronounce them ら, り, る, れ, and ろ.

Lol, i think you got it mixed up, have you ever heard the "L"
sound in the japanese language? When japanese try to speak a language with the "L" sound, they say "R" instead, example: herro

No sh*t...:cool:

Japanese can't distinguish "l" and "r" consonants because there is ONLY one liquid consonant in the phonology.

Same goes to Korean and other languages around the world (mostly non-Indo European).