Can someone explain me why **アルファ** is spoken as Alpha?
I get that the **ァ** makes the **フ** to **FA** but at this point it would still sound like: “**arufa**” for me.
So my main question is why or how **ル** is changed to something that sounds like a “L”
which would make it sound like this -> “A-L-FA”
6 comments
R is not an R, but more like a L. Check out some videos explaining and showing the tongue position on R sounds and it’ll make more sense
Well what else would it be? Sometimes it doesn’t phonetically match up because they’re different languages.
You do understand Japanese doesn’t have a separate letter for “L”?
In the Japanese I’ve listened to (music, anime, conversation practice with my teacher) the Japanese R can be pronounced pretty much anywhere from L almost to R, and sometimes it even comes out sounding like a D. The same speaker, sometimes even with the same word, might pronounce it different places on that spectrum. Translating that consonant spectrum to English isn’t exactly possible, so we just call it “Japanese R”, even though they don’t have L *or* R the way we do.
Basically it’s weird (and kinda cool).
You might just be putting too much emphasis on the ル. It can be a bad habit after learning individual kana. Think of how す is pronounced at the end of words for a rough example
TL;DR: There is no L in Japanese.
The [flapped R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_and_flaps) (which technically doesn’t exist in English outside of dialects) of Japanese differs both from the [postalveolar approximant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolar_and_postalveolar_approximants) used in English for R and the [lateral approximant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants) used for L.
Neither sound exists in Japanese, so when transliterating them they both get rolled into ラ行 (らりるれろ). This is why Japanese stereotypically have trouble distinguishing between R and L; neither sound exists in Japanese, so they sound the same to a Japanese person who hasn’t explicitly practiced how to distinguish them.
Also, pronunciation side note: the f is also technically different. It’s not our [labiodental fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_labiodental_fricative) (made with the upper teeth and lower lip). It’s [bilabial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_fricative) (done with the lips). So if you’re practicing pronunciation, you want to try to bring your lips close together to produce it.
This is why it gets rolled in with the ‘h’ consonant; there’s very little obstruction going on here, so it’s a lot less distinct compared to the labiodental. This is also why Japanese has no V, because V is the voiced labiodental fricative, and Japanese doesn’t have the unvoiced variant.