Wahaha!~ as someone might say. I guess the problem is that where I'm living right now, the range of phonemes I'm exposed to is broader than usual. It doesn't improve my ability to tell native English speakers how to pronounce Asian sounds: it only improves my ability to tell when they're not making the right sound.Atario wrote:Hiragana seems to work pretty well. Anyway, this is not a matter of interlingual subtleties like rising tones that English doesn't encode for or the like. It's outright lazy wrongness. "Reen" and "Rihn" are not that close, any more than nice and noose are.
The 'r' sound in quite a large part of East Asia varies from something like a French 'r' to some sort of 'zhr' sound. It's not a clean 'r' as in 'reliable' or 'rage'. And so on, and so forth. About the only European language I know which attempts a wide enough range of symbols is Romanian, I think.
Perhaps it's a possibility that it's not 'outright lazy wrongness' but the inability to distinguish certain phonemes. Here's an old article about this phenomenon.