Quoted: Chinese pronounce the R as an L. It's the Japanese that often pronounce the L as R. (You gotta get this stuff right man!!)
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Actually, Mandarin (普通话/Pǔtōnghuà) has both an "r" and "l" phoneme. The "l" is pronounced as in English, the alveolar lateral approximant. However, the "r" is a retroflex approximant (represented as /ɻ/in IPA), and can be confused for an "l" by an ignorant listener. To pronounce it, pull your lips back, flex your tounge back so it is between the palate and the palatal/alveolar ridge, and try to say "r." See
the Wikipedia article on retroflex consonants.Cantonese, however, has no "r" phoneme at all, but Standard Mandarin is the standard spoken language of the PRC and the Cantonese dialects are dying out.
In Japanese, the "r" sound is described in the Wikipedia article on Japanese phonology:
/r/ (transcribed ɾ̠ above) is a lateral apical postalveolar flap. It is similar to the Korean r. To an English speaker's ears, its pronunciation lies somewhere between a flapped r /ɾ/ (as in American English better and ladder), an l, and a d, sounding most like d before /i/, and most like l before /o/.
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Japanese has no equivalent to the "l" sound, so they use "r" or drop the sound. Likewise, there is no "v" or true "f;" "v" is replaced with "b" and "f" is pronounced as "h" (except for the mora "fu," pronounced /ɸɯ/ in IPA and with no true equivalent in English; the "f" is provided as a bilabial fricative [shape your mouth to say "wh-" as in "what," but blow harshly to make something closer to "h"] and the "u" in Japanese is like /u/ with the lips spread rather than rounded). However, this is not the strangest feature of their phonology; the most noticible is that all syllables (morae, technically) are either single vowels, a single consonant followed by a single vowel, or the nasal "n." So, to transcribe, say, "calculator," you would use the kana for the morae /ka.kyu.re.i.ta.a/. As a note, "kyu," "hyu," "ryu," etc. are possible in Japanese as palatized single consonants, just as "tsu" and "chi" are possible because the "ts-" and "ch-" sounds are really represented by one consonant. The phonology is really more complex than should be described in a simple post.
If you would like to know more about East Asian linguistics, pronunciation, accents, and how they transfer to English, I could write a full-on topic about it with a comprehensive description, but this topic is about Chinese motorcycles.