R and L in English: how to finally tell them apart
For speakers of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and several other languages, English r and l are a classic challenge. Many of these languages have one sound somewhere in between, so the English distinction is hard both to hear and to make.
It is fixable. The two sounds are made in very different ways, and once you can feel the difference, you can train it.
The English L
- Touch the tip of your tongue to the ridge just behind your top front teeth.
- Let air flow around the sides of your tongue.
- Keep the tip in contact while you voice the sound.
The key feeling is contact. Your tongue tip is pressed against the roof of your mouth.
At the end of words (feel, call, milk), English uses a “dark L” — the back of the tongue also rises a little, giving it a deeper, almost w-like quality. Do not worry about this at first; get the contact right.
The English R
- Pull your tongue back and curl the tip slightly up — or bunch the body of the tongue up in the middle. Both work.
- Do not let the tip touch anything. This is the most important part.
- Round your lips a little, as if starting to say w.
The key feeling for r is no contact. If your tongue tip touches the roof of your mouth, you will produce something closer to an l or a tapped r.
Training your ears first
If you cannot hear the difference, it is very hard to produce it reliably. Start with minimal pairs — words that differ only in that sound:
- right / light
- read / lead
- rock / lock
- pray / play
- collect / correct
- fly / fry
Listen to a native speaker say them, then try to identify which one you heard before checking.
Training your mouth
- Say each pair slowly, paying attention to contact (L) versus no contact (R).
- Move into short phrases: really late, light rain, rarely lonely.
- Shadow natural speech. Real sentences are full of r and l in every position — beginning, middle, end, and inside clusters like pr, bl, gr.
- Check the per-sound feedback. With phoneme-level scoring, you can see whether the r in correct was recognized as an r, instead of guessing.
- Repeat the weak word, then the full sentence, so the fix survives at normal speed.
Be patient with clusters
Words like world, girl, rural, and library combine both sounds in tricky ways, even for native speakers. Leave them until the simple cases are comfortable. Progress on r and l is usually gradual — but it is very real once your ears start catching the difference.
Want more sound-by-sound help? Read how to improve your English pronunciation and how to reduce your accent in English.