🚀 go-pugleaf

K. Brooke Wayne is concerned about the following:

My junior high school students are all able to say "hello," mimicing the
/l/ sound pretty well (in the Japanese sound system we have no /l/, so
usually the /r/ is substituted when speaking a foreign word with a /l/).
I've worked with them on it, and when I say "hello," I say "hello," not
"ha-ro."

Firstly, I am not an expert on the Japanese language, but I do know that
although the Japanese use the letters /ra/ /ri/ /ru/ /re/ and /ro/, the
pronunciation is closer to /l/ than the English /r/ or sometimes one and
sometimes the other. I had some difficulty figuring this out when trying
to learn Japanese (I'm thinking of the word "hidari," which means
left and what about 'benri"?)!

I believe that this romaji representation of the sound system leads to
confusion when Japanese are learning English (and vice versa). Most of
my students can produce word initial /l/ and /r/, but have trouble with
-ar, -er, -or, -ur, and -ir, wherever they appear within a word. And as
Aleda Krause points out about her Japanese husband:

"He tells me he has learned to say them both, but they don't stay in his
mind as separate phonemes, so he needs to be reminded of the spelling to
say them correctly."

Japanese people have had a great time with my name, pronunciation and
spelling.

As for Brooke's wondering whether to confront his friends:

I think my friends are doing their students a disservice by greeting
them that way. Even if their students were incapable of making the /l/
sound (and the students *are* capable), I still think it is their duty,
as NS teachers, to pronounce it correctly.

I'd rather not advise, but I had a similar experience with kids in my
neighborhood. I usually just greeted them in Japanese. I think this was
more of a game with them. I limited my teaching to the classroom. And I
often had differing opinions with other EFL teachers, many of whom were
not language teachers (self-taught or certified) in their home
countries. It can be more trouble than it's worth.

Lora Zangari  lzangari@REDROSE.NET

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