japanese for begginers Salaryman (サラリーマン,, Sararīman, salaried man)

Memorizing and studying hiragana and katakana is great Japanese for beginners. Knowing the sounds of each syllabogram helps with proper pronunciation of Japanese words.  For example, lets take a look at the word “サラリーマン” pronounced “Sararīman”.  This is actually a word borrowed from the English phrase “Salary man” meaning business man who earns a salaried income.  Since there is no “L” sound in Japanese the sound becomes “R”.  People who are ignorant of this in the West make fun of this difference, but those of us who know better realize that Japanese and some Chinese dialects have little of no use of “L” (more explanation at the bottom).  Learning the Japanese kana syllabary allows a beginners to get familiar with these kinds of nuances of sound pronunciation.  

Here is a great explaination of the the /l/ /r/ sounds for asian languages:
As I understand, in at least some major dialects of Chinese (maybe all, I don’t know), the /l/ and /r/ sounds exist but are prosodically restricted. The /l/ can only appear syllable-initially while the /r/ appears syllable-finally. This means that a Chinese speaker would have more trouble with an /l/ sound at the end of a word and also with an /r/ sound at the beginning of a word. This means that a speaker should be able to pronounce the /l/ in “ladder” but have difficulty with “red”. This agrees with Jon Purdy’s examples of yimier for “email” and luōqièsītè for “Rochester”.

Korean has the opposite going on; that is, their /l/ and /r/ are in allophonic variation such that /r/ shows up syllable-initially and /l/ syllable-finally, meaning they would have more trouble saying the /l/-sound in “ladder” than in “feel”.

In both cases, it would not be trivial for a native speaker of these languages to distinguish the differences between English /l/ and /r/.

It may seem strange that a language would have no difficulty pronouncing a sound in one position in the syllable but extreme difficulty pronouncing the sound elsewhere. However, in English, we have similarly restricted consonants. For example, the consonant /ŋ/ (the “ng” sound in “hanger” — yes it is only one sound, unlike “finger” which has the sequence [ŋɡ]) is only produced syllable-finally in English. But, in many other languages, words commonly begin with /ŋ/ (e.g. Swahili). So the difficulty you would have pronouncing “ngapi” (/ŋapi/) is the same type of difficulty Chinese and Korean speakers run into with /r/ and /l/ in certain places.

In Japanese, there is only one sound that appears in all positions within the syllable. Their /r/ sound is something between /l/ and /r/, and so every English /l/ sound comes out sounding like something “r”-ish. — english stack exchange