Asian challenges hearing and pronouncing R and L

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 12:49 am

Stephen Jones wrote:I wasn't aware that you had taken me to task since, as I informed you a couple of years back, I have long given up reading any of your posts.

You of course don't have to read my posts when they are not strictly "in reply" to any of yours (i.e. on threads that are of no interest to you or that you choose not to get involved in), but it is surely the height of arrogance to act as if you do not need to defend any disagreeable comments that you might make, especially when they follow posts that I have made; I appreciate however that I should perhaps let the OP get back to you now in their own good time.

What the student did was idiotic, and wasted everybody's time. Even if his teacher had expressed himself with little finesse he was not making racist comments and to make an official complaint instead of mentioning it to the teacher, or better still simply forgetting about it, has just wasted everybody's time, and shown up the OP as having a large chip on his shoulder and an oversized sense of entitlement.

OK, it might not be blatant racism, but surely it is something - idiocy "too", at the very least? Discrimination of a sort/a failure to "discriminate"? Should idiots be allowed to be teachers? And talking of a sense of entitlement, you sure feel entitled to fan whatever bad feelings somebody might have had but just about been getting over (before you p-ed them off yet more). But again, I really should let the OP get back to you on that.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 1:02 am

In my Spanish class my Teacher Assistant highlighted "Asians cannot hear or pronounce R and L" after I had asked another student to repeat what they said. I am extremely offended by this comment as I can hear and pronounce Rs and Ls perfectly well. I just didn't hear that student over every other student speaking.

Wailing.li, can you remember what the student actually said to you (assuming that you caught it the second time round, just when the TA was butting in)? Did it have a lot of l's and r's in it?! LOL!

Hey, I'm waiting for SJ to remark that you are indeed "wailing" (as in, wail-ing), he'd probably get a kick out of saying something like that (I can assure you that I didn't LOL).

revel · Post by **revel** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:37 am

Hey all!

Thanks, S Jones, for the info, I'll try to see if I can find the paper you mention, sounds interesting and a good piece of information for some of my students.

peace,
revel.

Wailing.li · Post by **Wailing.li** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 2:24 pm

Thank you for all the input.

To clarify the issue, here's what happened.

The TA has made the initial comment 5 weeks ago when I asked a student to repeat herself "mi padres es un piloto", once the student repeated that statement I was fine however the TA wrote on the black board "Asians cannot hear R and L". I was offended, was she saying that to excuse a handicap I was unaware of, is there a predetermined cap on my potential because I'm Asian? The comment was unsolicited and was not used in the right context not mention said infront of my peers and since I'm the only Asian - singled me out!

The 2nd time was 2 weeks ago when another student asked how to pronounce "V vs. B" in Spanish. She was all defensive because "V and B" is an ongoing discussion however once she was finished with her explanation of "V and B" she repeats and writes on the board Asians cannot hear "R and L".

The complaint to the university may appear to be idiotic however other students who have heard the comment (non-asians) are also upset. By making comments like that without referencing other ethnicities you are discriminating a race...check the human rights code. An institution offering high learning should not permit TAs or Professors to make blanket statements like that even if there are proof unless you can show other challenges by other ethicities. I spoke up and said to her "I do not have challenges hearing and pronouncing my R and L, I may have difficulties understanding Spanish from Spain vs. Cuban but I do not have a problem". She did not apologize when everyone else in the class sensed I was offended and when I filed my complaint, my professor said off-record, she is young and inexperienced. Is that justification for this behaviour?

As far as proof is concerned, it seems to be only applicable to people learning the English and not people who have been raised or born in North America!

Her background is Polish, not sure if English was her first or second language.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 5:28 pm

It sounds then like it is definitely this TA who is the idiot (rather than you). What she did is bizarre to say the least, and was bound to rub any native speaker of American English of Asian descent the wrong way up. I'm not saying hound her from her job, but she sure needs some sort of gagging to stop her from making offensive comments; an apology (even an unofficial one) would be nice, too (otherwise how will she learn the error of her ways). Then again, being "adult" about this, I suppose if she were to make a similar comment a third time you should just endure it because it's possibly just you who has an oversized sense of entitlement or a chip on your shoulder or something.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 6:00 pm

Wailing.li wrote:By making comments like that without referencing other ethnicities you are discriminating a race...check the human rights code. An institution offering high learning should not permit TAs or Professors to make blanket statements like that even if there are proof unless you can show other challenges by other ethicities.

I think the main point is that it was an inappropriate and stupid thing to say when you are a native speaker of a language that possesses the phonemes l and r. The fact that there are lots more problems that various speakers of various L1s might have with various L2s, that the TA could've quoted, is surely irrelevant when her initial basis for speaking was so misjudged (and I know that I for one couldn't see the point of the trotting out of all the stuff about minimal pairs in this thread). But you are aware of this, cos you also said:

I was offended, was she saying that to excuse a handicap I was unaware of, is there a predetermined cap on my potential because I'm Asian? The comment was unsolicited and was not used in the right context...I spoke up and said to her "I do not have challenges hearing and pronouncing my R and L, I may have difficulties understanding Spanish from Spain vs. Cuban but I do not have a problem"...As far as proof is concerned, it seems to be only applicable to people learning English and not people who have been raised or born in North America!

I think if you keep trying to go down the racism/discrimination/anti-blanket avenue you might just keep getting people giving you linguistics lectures and almost appearing to back up what you teacher said on a purely "factual" level (i.e. they will divorce the statement from its specific context and say that there is nothing actually wrong with "what she said"); at most you'd probably just get a slight modification along the lines of, 'OK, only SOME Asians have these problems' (and all probably without admitting to you that YOU are not one of those poor Asians).

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 8:17 pm

It looks as though the TA was out of order, but what I'm not clear about is whether the OP made a formal complaint immediately or took it up with the individual concerned.

Maybe American practice is different on this (though please someone feel free to correct me), but wherever I've worked in the UK, it's generally been considered normal to try to resolve these things informally by having a quiet word before invoking formal complaints procedures.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 8:30 pm

By making comments like that without referencing other ethnicities you are discriminating a race...check the human rights

Ha, ha, Ha!

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 11:09 pm

Why wouldn't Wailing.li simply respond to this situation by saying "No, only monlingual Japanese and Korean speakers cannot usually distinguish R and L very well". I guess it is because nobody in that classroom actually knew very much about these issues. The TA was just stupidly parroting some "fact", I don't suppose that they really meant any harm by it, even if they were foolish to assume something like that about a particular student. There must be some kind of alternative here to marching off to cry "racism", which is a very serious accusation for anyone to face. It seems like nobody actually made a complaint or comment of any kind after the first incident, if so, why should the TA not say the "fact" again?

By the way, despite the fact that Chinese people have trouble pronouncing the English "r", their language has the minimal pairs written "re" and "le" in pinyin, so I don't think they really should be included. So East Asian isn't really the right term, the right term is a bit of a mouthful.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 1:23 am

Actually for those who are interested, there are several more finals that follow initials l- and r- to produce same-sounding syllables in Pinyin - see the top part of the following chart (from -a down to -ong):
http://www.pinyin.info/rules/initials_finals.html

The fact that wailing.li didn't fly off the handle the first time round surely says something, and why should the onus for getting the "linguistic" facts of the matter straight fall upon the student? Put simply, the teacher should've known her students better, and no amount of massaging the offending statement's factual basis by her or anyone else would've made it any less inappropriate or irrelevant. Racism might not be the best way to describe it, but it makes for a working term that hints that whatever sort of BS it is that "we're" dealing with, it won't be taken lying down should it continue. Hopefully the teacher will wise up pronto and watch her words in future (so maybe wailing.li will let it slide and/or withdraw the complaint, rather than make too much of it, perhaps to a point where there might be some sort of "profit" in it to the teacher's excessive detriment).

Wailing.li · Post by **Wailing.li** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 3:22 am

Thank you everyone especially fluffymaster for insight and the link.

I have not withdrawn my complaint and the University acknowledges there was an offense made.

I allowed the 1st time to slide because she is not an official teacher and hoped that she realized she shouldn't have said it however by the 2nd time I responded to her infront of the class "I do not have any problems or challenges speaking or hearing L and R" of course the class was silent and she continued on.

In a society of diversity and sensitivity no one should make a blanket statement just because there is proof. One can say some but not generalize to indicate all. In a scholastic environment whereby students have the option to learn different languages, it is acceptable to demonstrate different ethnic challenges but only when you provide multiple examples. I am not ignorant of the challenges a teacher face when teaching a second language but how is it right for a teacher to just single out one ethnic group and be deemed appropriate.

A professor from another university told a black student to not bother to learn German because Blacks cannot pronounce German words properly. I'm not certain what happened to that professor but is that appropriate?

In all my scholastic years this is the only negative experience and I am going to write it off and call it a night.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 6:09 am

The situation is different from the black people and German comment, which is unacceptable, because Asian quite commonly refers to East Asians, and many East Asians do tend to have trouble with R and L, if they grew up in East Asia. The TA is making a crude attempt to say something which is true. Also, it isn't a big slur to say such a thing. If some Chinese teacher of mine says twice that Europeans can't get the tones right in Chinese, do you think I should run to the school authorities and mention racism?

Come to think of it, my Chinese teacher in London probably said something similar more than twice. And, my word, SOAS is hot to root out racism. I feel some lucrative blackmail coming on..........

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 10:00 am

A professor from another university told a black student to not bother to learn German because Blacks cannot pronounce German words properly. I'm not certain what happened to that professor but is that appropriate?

We can't comment because we don't have the exact quote. If he was advising a speaker of an African language that he would have difficulties with consonant clusters in German because they didn't exist in L1 and that the student would do better to take a language such as Spanish that does not have them, he would be acting quite responsibly and correctly.

If he was advising native English speaking black-American students not to take German because of this, then he is a fool. I would actually recommend an official complaint in this case, not because of any of the diversity mumbo-jumbo wailing.li is chanting, but because advising students about the difficulties of the course is an integral part of his job, and if he is so totally ignorant then remedial action is necessary.

We don't know the details so we can't make a definite recommendation.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 10:50 pm

The quote given seems fairly exact Stephen, whether to believe it is another question I suppose.

sonya · Post by **sonya** » Thu Dec 13, 2007 2:01 am

Out of curiosity, what can possibly be the debate about Spanish v and b? Basically, v and b have both been b since the late middle ages; b has since been lenited into a bilabial fricative intervocalically, g and d have undergone a similar change.

Man, how rude of her to write that on the board. The mere fact that she said "Asian languages" means she doesn't know what she was talking about. It's only Japanese that really has this problem, since r and l are both the American intervocalic t (which is the Spanish short r). Japanese and Korean aren't even remotely related to any of the other East Asian languages.

(Side note, Pakistani and Armenian are Indo-European languages).

When I was studying in a French university I had this crazy professor.. like, really crazy, never knew what she was saying and occasionally going off on little soliloquies as if she was in a play by herself, and she was teaching a French for foreign speakers class that I took. I speak English and Chinese and together it's such that I have an easier time pronouncing the vowels in French than most Americans, and my accent isn't instantly identifiable as English. She totally decided to make me an example for all the other Asians in class one day and asked me to say certain words, and I said them, then she said, "No... no... I remember you've said then differently before, and I remember thinking it must be the effect of Chinese." "My native language is English." "No..no... what is your first language?" "It's English. I'm American." She looked flabbergasted while several people in the class snickered at her. If it wasn't so outrageous I might've been upset, but as it was it was just funny.