We have all heard those jokes about Chinese people mixing up L and R sounds while speaking English. What causes this? Is it related to the vocals of Chinese language and the way they speak their own language?
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Chinese language doesn’t differentiate between L and R sounds. So Chinese speakers often have a tough time learning them later in life.
Similarly, English speakers often have trouble differentiating between zh/ch/sh sounds in Chinese, and are *hopeless* with second tone unless they’ve had a lot of practice.
So this is actually really interesting. When you’re a baby, all the spoken sounds you hear are kind of just noise. They also exist on what is essentially a spectrum of noises. L and R aren’t just two distinct sounds, they’re a whole array of lots of different, very similar sounds that continuously flows from sounding like an L on one end to sounding like an R on the other end, kind of like the spectrum you get on a colour chart between blue and yellow, that passes through blue-greens, greens and yellow-greens. Over time as a baby is exposed to language, it learns to start distinguishing different sections of this continuous sound spectrum. Its brain starts categorising sounds into groups – picking a chunk of the spectrum and labelling every sound within that chunk “B” for example. From that point on, every time the brain hears any of the sounds in that chunk, it identifies the sound as “the B sound” before sending the signal on to the language processing part of the brain. That bit doesn’t get the unedited audio, rather, it gets what is basically a transcript of the audio that’s been compressed down into simpler, lower resolution bits that convey less detailed information, to make figuring out the words faster and easier.
Where exactly the brain decides to place these chunks depends on the language the baby is exposed to and the sounds it uses. Different languages will create different chunks in the baby. These chunks are usually reasonably similar between languages – for example, pretty much every language has a “T” sound, and that sound chunk usually covers pretty much the same band of sounds. There is a degree of variation, however. For example, quite a few languages don’t put a chunk boundary between B and P sounds, but just create one large chunk that is both B and P, which makes B and P sound the same to the brain. This is what happens with L and R in the brains of people whose native language is East Asian (At least for Chinese and Japanese anyway, not sure about the rest). An English brain has two chunks, one for L and one for R, but a Chinese brain only has one much bigger chunk for both L *and* R. It averages those sounds out, so both an L sound and an R sound will be interpreted as the same sound in the brain. Basically, Chinese people can’t *hear* the difference between L and R. There are some techniques to kind of get around this, but they’re usually unreliable and a bit shit. Tangentially, this is also why learning how to pronounce certain languages can be really hard for English speakers – we can’t actually hear the difference between certain sounds, so we can’t tell whether we’ve said it correctly or not.
Also, this is why, if you listen to one of these languages enough, you start being able to notice the same speaker seemingly saying both L sounds *and* R sounds pretty interchangeably. The natural flow of speech means that you don’t always hit the exact perfect spot when you say a syllable. You don’t usually notice cos your brain categorises the mistake as the same sound anyway, but in these languages, the syllable’s natural position is often *really* close to what would be the boundary to an English listener, which means when it slips it can often slip over the boundary, causing the English brain to categorise a *slight* difference in actual sound as a *completely* different sound, because it happened to cross over the boundary between rounding up and rounding down. To use a maths comparison – 1.49 and 1.51 are very nearly the same number, but if you’re rounding to the nearest whole number, your calculations are going to interpret this as a difference of an entire 1, rather than the 0.02 it actually is.
When we learn to speak as children, our brain makes the connections it needs to make the vocal sounds for the language we’re learning. You need those brain connections to make that sound. So if you learn Chinese as your first languange, and don’t speak English a lot, then your brain will not create and keep the connections needed to know how to make English sounds like R/L.
It’s not impossible for your brain to make the connections in later life, but it takes a LOT longer, and is best done by immersing yourself in the language and speaking it a lot.
Many languages, like Chinese, involve using the back of the mouth and the throat to make the appropriate sounds. In English, many sounds like L and R are made by manipulating the front of the mouth like the lips and the tongue. People learning English often have difficulty with this as their brains are not used to manipulating that area of their mouth with that precision. Vice versa as well. English speakers can have trouble learning Chinese for the same reason
Have you seen babies? They need years to learn to speak properly. But the list of sound we use regularly is much smaller than the list of sound our mouth is capable of making.
Simply put, they are CAPABLE of making these sounds. They just don’t know how. The R sound doesn’t exist in chinese. The closest is L. Or rather a sound that is a mix of L and R. And most people don’t spend month trying to learn how to make a sound they don’t plan on using their whole life.
At about age 10 your brain starts to lose its ability to learn to both hear and form new language sounds, and almost completely loses it by the time you’re 12.
If your native language doesn’t have a particular letter sound and you don’t learn it in language classes before you’re ~12 you often have to go to a lot of effort to train your brain to be able to either differentiate or form the sound.
What often happens instead is your brain substitutes in a close sound (the L an R are fairly close, when you don’t learn them as a child, similar B and P / D and T (voiced/unvoiced) in English are very similar and hard to tell apart when not learned while young.
You’ll find the same thing if you try to speak a language that includes sounds that are not in your own native language – you’ll think you’re getting it right and can’t understand why your replication isn’t understood, it’s because you think you’re saying the sounds all right but are miles off for some of them.
Mandarin speakers can definitely pronounce both since they have both sounds in the language. You’re probably thinking of Japanese speakers, but people joke about Japanese and Chinese interchangeablely because they all look the same to them.
This is untrue. *Japanese* speakers have difficulty differentiating between L and R, not *Chinese* speakers. Japanese and Chinese are completely different languages without any clear relationship. Chinese is a tonal language and Japanese is not. Japanese has a sound in it that is sort of like an L, sort of like an R, and sort of like a D (as seen from the perspective of an English speaker and these sounds in English).
In the brain, there is a process called neural pruning. There are an enormous number of neurons with an enormous amount of potential in the human brain, when you are born. As you age, the neurons you use less atrophy and go away, and the neurons you use more are strengthened and built connections throughout the brain. This includes the detection and comprehension of sounds. Because in Japanese it’s not important to distinguish the particular sounds of R and L since they just have a sound that is a combination of both sounds, that ability is lost, so even in Japanese people who speak English really really well, they still have trouble distinguishing the two sounds–it’s not a case of not having studied enough to have the skills, it just that they can’t hear it. This neural pruning takes place throughout your life but especially in the early years of your life, which is why a kid can learn a new language with no accent before age 12 or so, but after that age, there’s just too much neural pruning that has taken place and it’s extremely difficult to lose the accent unless the languages have similar sounds.
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