Difficult sounds

[Torigaa Fenikkusu]

I know that the japanese have a very hard time pronouncing the "L" sound, and instad make the "R" sound. I'm having a very hard time explaining this to someone who speaks english. Is there any sounds the english language have a difficult time making?, so I can put things in perspective for this person...

[American Oyaji]

Its quite easy to explain.

Humans learn how to make sounds from birth.
There is no R or L sound in the Japanese language and every consonant is always followed by a vowel sound, so to have a consonant without a vowel is difficult to reporgram ones own mental programming.

The rolling R in spanish for example is hard for most english speakers to master.

[Andocrates]

Eh! That message was not as clear as you intended, maybe we found the problem. If you mean Japanese sounds that hard to say in English then fu pu and tsu come to mind. As well as crisp word stops.

We don't really think about it but english is rather difficult to pronounce, Japanese doesn't really have the explosive P, T, K, etc sounds, the 'plosives they made are more teeth ridge sounds. You could suffer a stoke and still speak fairy easy to understand Japanese where as English requires many more mouth positions.