>>149341287
>It’s L they substitute with R.
Linguist here. I specialise in in linguistic emergence but I know about this stuff, too.
Anyway, it's the other way around, too. Once they learn to pronounce L, Japanese do what many cultures do when they learn to pronounce foreign sounds: hyperforeignism, a well-documented subset of hypercorrection. Hypercorrection is the tendency to overcorrect a pronunciation or phrase use to the point of being incorrect all over again.
For example, Poles do it with V/W sounds. They learn to pronounce W and suddenly, your sausages contain circular objects that revolve around axels (your pork-and-veal serdelky will be pork-and-wheel).
Americans routinely say habañero, despite the word having no ñ.
And for some phrases subject to hypercorrection, it's extremely common for someone to say 'you and I' in cases where the proper declension would be 'you and me' because some teacher corrected their use of you and me once but didn't explain why it was wrong.
Back to Japanese, while the L/R thing is well-known, the less commonly known one is the H/F/P switcheroo. My aunt was from Kobe but lived in Italy with her husband, my Italian uncle. She spoke Italian quite well, likely because Japanese and Italian are moreorless phonetically identical, but she had problems with F from time to time. She could say caffè (coffee) just fine but couldn't say finestra (window; she would say pinestra) or fuoco (fire; huoco or woco). When she finally figured out how to pronounce F, suddenly everything became an F.
Pala and palla (shovel and ball, respectively) became fala and falle. Ponte (bridge) became fonte. Piselli (peas), fiselli. It's just a thing that happens.
