I was taking an English lesson on the iOS English conversation app "Speak" a while ago. As I thought, my pronunciation of "L" is not good at all. No matter how many times I speak into the microphone, the AI always recognizes it as "ruh. I always put my tongue on the roof of my mouth and push it forward to speak, but it doesn't work. Too bad.
@kotaro The linguistics thing that babies who dont hear certain speech components, phoenemes etc when first learning languge will always find it harder to identify & copy correct pronunciation
English babies not exposed to rolling Rs will have trouble with distinguishing & reproducing for example. African languages with glottal stops, clicks etc are v hard when not native. Japanese that develop language without hearing European Ls feel same trouble of it not being a native component sound iirc
@kotaro
Here's how I do it.
No teeth!
Move tip of your tongue back from teeth, across the flat palate to the ridge where roof of your mouth curves up.
Push the tip of your tongue into that ridge/slope, little bit of pressure so it curls very slightly. Just the tip though not whole width of tongue.
If you flick your tongue tip forward so it uncurls you will already without adding breath produce a very faint L sound.
Add breath in the same way as an R sound, but with that little flick forward =L
@ArtBear That's right. I had quite a few opportunities to be exposed to the pronunciation of R, but maybe I didn't have enough opportunities to be exposed to the pronunciation of L by English speakers. Another reason may be that the body parts that make the voice resonate are quite different between Japanese and English, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the two in a stereo recording.
@kotaro it's not physiology, babies developing language in a locale with the linguistic sound components included in use can do the components easily. Second generation kids everywhere show that.
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