See the difference
Both sounds touch the ridge behind your top teeth, so you can't feel the difference with your tongue tip. What changes is a flap at the back of your mouth, the soft palate. It drops to send air through the nose for n, and lifts to close the nose off for l.
The nose test
- Pinch your nose shut and say "nnn". The sound should stop, or feel blocked. That is a real n.
- Still pinching, say "lll". It should keep going with no change. That is a real l.
- If l stops when you pinch, air is leaking through your nose. Try again, and think of the air going over the sides of your tongue.
- Let go. Say "night, light, night, light", pinching on "light" to check the l stays clear.
Pairs to practice
- nineline
- needlead
- netlet
- snowslow
Who this affects
Not all Chinese speakers. It is regional. In a study of Southwestern Mandarin speakers, English words starting with l came out wrong 33% of the time and words starting with n 17%. It also comes up elsewhere in southern China and in Taiwan. If you are from Beijing, for example, this page may not be your problem. We didn't find a study that tests training for it, so the nose test here comes from how the sounds are made.
What to do next
Reading how a sound is made helps, but a page can't tell you whether your own tongue got there. In Language Boss, every sound you say in a scene is scored after the call, and you're told what it came out as. X-ray Mouth draws the tongue and lips over your own cheek while you say a phrase to the camera, so you can see what to change. X-ray Mouth is free.
Questions
Why can't I hear the difference between n and l?
If your first dialect doesn't separate them, your ear learned to treat them as one sound. Hearing them apart is a skill you can train, and practice with many pairs helps. Use the nose test to check what you're making while your ear catches up.
Does this also help with n and l in Mandarin?
Yes. The physical difference is the same, so the nose test works for 牛奶 and 刘奶奶 too.
