Those Damn Ls and Rs

I’m often asked, generally in Japan, which language I’m more comfortable with, English or Japanese.  Since my subconscience* (i.e. my dreams) has been in English for years, the answer to the question is obvious.

That answer, though, is actually a matter of relativity.  Just because English is my better language doesn’t mean I’m a good English speaker, reader or writer.  My performance on SAT Verbal suggests that I was merely above average in my English abilities more than a decade ago.

It’s hard to tell whether my journey of becoming a lawyer improved my English skills, but there is one way in which my English remains, well, that of a typical Japanese.

No doubt you’ve heard about how the Japanese have trouble distinguishing the “l”s and the “r”s.  I learned English during my carefree youth so I don’t recall being frustrated with this problem, but I came face to face with this when I tutored English to children who just arrived from Japan.  They all had trouble distinguishing “fly” from “fry”, “glass” from “grass” and “lock” from “rock.”

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that they had trouble pronouncing the “r” words.  “Fry” will sound like “fly” and so on.

I digress, but for this reason, I’ve always thought it peculiar that the Japanese use “r”s instead of “l”s when writing Japanese phonetically in the Roman alphabet.  I don’t know what moron decided to go with “r”s, but I’m pretty certain he was a Japanese who wasn’t pronouncing it correctly.  It’s about time the government seriously considered using “l”s instead of “r”s.  That would surely please my sister, who always hated that her passport stated her name as Risa.

Since I was mostly educated in America, one syllable “r” words don’t give me any difficulties.  But add a couple syllables and the only thing you’ll get from me is silence.

You will, for example, never hear me say the word “parallel” and “camaraderie” because there are far too many “r”s and “l”s to pronounce them right.  In daily usage, I replace the word “parallel” with a gesture of two fingers indicating the relationship of two lines the word describes.

Because I can’t pronounce the words, I can’t spell them either.  When I type “parallel” or “collaboration,”  I usually end up with something like “pararell” or “corraboration.”

Spellcheck obviously picks these up as misspellings, but they have no suggestions to offer.  The reason’s obvious.  No native English speaker mixes “l”s and “r”s.

Which is why I was recently impressed with www.thesaurus.com when I had my latest run in with the damn “l”s and “r”s.  I was looking to use the word “laden,” as in “my most recent post on the Apple mouse is laden with sarcasm,” when I typed in “raden.”  The computer showed that annoying red line indicating that I misspelled.

This is a fairly common occurrence.  In addition to mixing “l”s with “r”s, I mix “a”s with “e”s, “i”s with “e”s and “o”s with “au”s.  Essentially, if it sounds similar in my not-so-perfect pronunciation, I have a tendency to jumble them.  Thus like I always do, I dutifully started replacing “raden” with “raiden,” “radin,” “reden,” and “redin” but alas, like now, I got nothing but red lines.

This, too, is all too common, but I have a backup plan: to consult www.thesaurus.com to give me suggestions.

When I looked up “raden,” the website asked, “Did you mean redden?” No, I did not.  I don’t even know what that word means.

But then it listed all other possibilities below and, voila!, on top was the word “laden.”   I knew that was what I was looking for even without clicking on the word to see the meaning.  I was once again reminded how I hate “l”s and “r”s.

But I was impressed that the website picked up my Japanese-esq mix up.  I tested its limits by typing in “corraborate” and “pararell.”  It knew what I wanted in the former but not in the latter.  The site’s pretty good, but it’s clear a Japanese person didn’t design it.

*See comment by Chris, who kindly points out that I misspelled this word.  A rather fitting mistake on a post about how my English still needs work.