Really?

May 10 22:35 UTC 2002

South Korea's baby-boomer parents in increasing numbers recently are 
sending their preschool youngsters for outpatient mouth surgery to snip 
the tissue under the tongue because they believe more tongue freedom will 
permit the children to pronounce the difficult "l" and "r" sounds that 
have long stigmatized many Asians when speaking English. "Learning 
English is almost the national religion" in South Korea, according to one 
educator quoted in a March Los Angeles Times report, but many authorities 
in South Korea say Asians' pronunciation trouble is purely cultural and 
that only a very few people are born with tight-enough tongues to be 
helped by these "frenectomies." [Los Angeles Times, 3-31-02]

response 2 of 22:

May 11 06:12 UTC 2002

that never stoped he mexicans ....

response 4 of 22:

May 12 23:00 UTC 2002

I had that kind of surgery when I was a kid.

response 6 of 22:

May 13 05:15 UTC 2002

Think about this for a moment.  There are US citizens who are of
pure asian genetics that speak english just as well if not
better than 'natives'.  Even first generation children if started
early enough can speak english like a 'native' as well as their
own cradle language.  Some asians speak little if anything other
than english and those 'foreign' languages they do speak are with
an 'american accent'.  Therefore it has nothing to do with the
physical and all to do with the mental.  Thus I deem the item#0
as urban legend and/or quack medicine.

response 8 of 22:

May 13 22:29 UTC 2002

i agree, that problem may exists among ALL humans sometimes, but for the most
part any dificulty with learning a new language is probably cultural. like
the french having trouble with the american "th" sound.

response 10 of 22:

May 14 18:56 UTC 2002

        If you believe Chomsky, we all start out with a much larger set of
potential phonemes and they're narrowed down by the language, or languages,
we're exposed to.

        Japanese, the language most infamous for confusing "r" and "l" does
have a "r" or "l" sound, but there's no distinction between the two in casual
usage.  It's not a difference all native Japanese speakers have been trained
to hear.

response 12 of 22:

May 15 01:33 UTC 2002

re #11: that's the definition of "phoneme": it makes a difference between
words. like /zoo/ and /shoo/ and /soo/

response 14 of 22:

May 16 02:24 UTC 2002

Actually, #12 was a response to #10, not #11.

response 16 of 22:

May 16 19:24 UTC 2002

English has both aspirated and unaspirated p and t and k, which in some
languages (those of India) are distinct sounds.  The unaspirated versions are
found after s (speak, stock, scat) and I think at the ends of words, and the
aspirated versions before vowels.  This may be a reason why English speakers
have trouble pronouncing Hindi.

response 20 of 22:

May 28 01:39 UTC 2002

Is Vietnamese as annoyingly alliterative as the phrase
"particularly pesky"?  ;-)

Something I learned about Farsi from a pronunciation error:  it
apparently requires a vowel sound between a consonant and an "s"
(perhaps only at the beginning of a word).  My sample Farsi
speaker had me quite confused about what we were drinking that
day because I had no idea what "oldehstile" was (well, it was
American pisswater beer to be sure, but I wanted specifics).

response 22 of 22:

May 30 02:41 UTC 2002

I imagine more languages than not would have trouble with "Old Style."  Three
consonants in a row is tricky, as is a voiced one (the d) with an unvoiced
one (the s) right after.