Language again

[dreamer_easy]

I can just about get my mouth around the Korean consonant ㄹ, which is somewhere between an "l" and an "r", and is sometimes pronounced more like "r" and sometimes more like "l". IIUC there's a similar sound in Japanese. My difficulty with ㄹ is of course the converse of the difficulty of Korean and Japanese speakers with "l" and "r".

Now, I am also interested in learning Mandarin one of these days, and was thinking that getting the hang of ㄹ would be helpful (as would the bits and pieces of Chinese which have made their way into Korean). Only, as it turns out, Standard Mandarin Chinese doesn't have a sound equivalent to ㄹ. It has "l", and this motherfucker: "ɻ". OTZ

Also, the "th" at the start of "this" and "that" is slightly different in American and British English. Which I had never consciously known until today.

Comments

[hnpcc]

When you say different... in all the dialects? How? Very curious.

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia doesn't give a citation for this, but I knew instantly what it meant: "Voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives [ð̟, θ̟] appear in American English as the initial sounds of words like 'then' and 'thin'. In British English, these consonants are more likely to be dental [ð, θ]."