Why is Japanese Hard?: The Japanese "R" Sound
Hello! I bring you more Rachael and Jun for another Japanese lesson ~ My research paper is about why Japanese is so difficult for English speakers, and how Japanese can be taught more efficiently to English speakers. One of the points I will touch on is the Japanese "r" sound (in IPA it is represented as / ɾ/ ). This sound is very difficult for English speakers, as the Japanese "r" is between the English"r" and "l", a sound we either don't have in English or don't use frequently. It doesn't help that Japanese people cannot hear the difference between "l" and "r", and when pronouncing English words, they often have to guess which sound they are supposed to be using. In the video above, Rachael and Jun talk about the position of the tongue when saying the Japanese "r" and how difficult it is to pronounce (Jun also gets tested on if he can identify whether a word uses "r" or "l", and
