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]

22 responses total.

Right; the 'problem' is that /r/ and /l/ are not phonemes in (some) East Asian
languages.  Just as English does not have an aspirated "t" (/th/ and /dh/
aren't the same as the aspirated t).

that never stoped he mexicans ....

I smell 'urban legend'.

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

Is that why you sing so well?

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.

I knew one American kid with this sort of problem who was supposed to get
surgery for it.  Also I have met several Slavs who were physically unable to
roll their r's so had to pronounce them German fashion (uvular).

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.

I suspect all of them are.  That said, some are probably really strongly
ingrained, and natives probably pick them up very young.  I've studied
Mandarin, and while I'm very good with languages I still find tones damn
difficult because I've been conditioned to read them as carrying emotional
content rather than meaning.

        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.

I have discovered that babies are delighted if you can repeat back to them
their nonsense syllables, which are usually full of phonemes not found in
English, such as a bilabial fricative (bbbbbbbb).

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

        
        Re #11:  We're strongly wired for that, yeah.  That's how we identify
the units of the language or languages we're born into.

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

Hrm.  According to www.korcon.com/intro/intro.htm, Korean has both [r] and
[l] sounds.  The problem is that [l] can only occur at the beginning or end
of a word, and [r] can only occur between vowels.  That makes it even harder
to believe that there's a physiological reason why speakers of Korean have
trouble with English [r] and [l].

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.

Which is correctly spelled Hindhi but English speakers do not distinguish
between d and dh either.

This response has been erased.

Vietnamese is also particularly pesky, as many of the letter 
pronounciations are rather subtle or have no equivalent in English, and 
are therefore often difficult to pronounce correctly.

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).

<laughs>  Depends on the dialect.

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.

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