Me and the Japanese

I have a lecturer who speaks a dialect of Norwegian which takes some getting used to (of course, this meant that he was always going to ask me a question on the first day, in the first ten minutes). However, I got there eventually after some consultation with my Nynorsk-Bokmål dictionary (the two varieties of written Norwegian).

Anyhow, welcome to the story of the Norwegian 'thick l'. Oh yes. Everyone who learns Norwegian comes up against it at some point. The 'l' sound which to me sounds more like a slightly retarded 'r'. It was a good week before I realised that if I swapped all these 'r' sounds I was hearing with 'l' sounds in my head, he made a lot more sense.

A couple weeks after this revelation, I was working as shift leader in Klubb Fantoft. My co-worker came hurrying in half an hour late, bumbling apologetically. She introduced herself as Leah (to my ears) from Japan. I couldn't help but grin ten minutes later when I was looking at the rota, and noticed that her name was written as Rie. Anyway, the point of this long bumbling tale is that I totally get the Japanese l/r confusion now - and it's hard I tell you!