Lee Sedol? Yi Setol?

[Kirby]

...
Also, I am ashamed to be told that Ri is Japanese sound, I am not supposed to make such a mistake, because I'm a Japanese!
...

I am not Japanese, so I will assume that you have authority on this, solomonko, but I feel it is a little misleading to say directly, "Ri is a Japanese sound," because, while り is commonly transcribed as "Ri," it does not always sound the same to me as an "r-sound" followed by an "ee" sound when I hear Japanese people pronounce this syllable.

In particular, the sound, to me, sounds to start with something between an English r-sound and l-sound, and can at times even have a sound similar to the letter d in English.

Probably in most cases, り sounds to start with a sound closest to the letter R in English, but it certainly does not seem to be definitely the case, in my opinion.

[solomonko]

Yes, you're right, Kirby.
It may sound like that.

[EdLee]

Similar to what Kirby said.
I thought the beginning consonant of (ら、り、る、れ、ろ), the English R sound, and the English L sound are all different from one another.
(In fact, one could detect different dialects of the beginning consonant of (ら、り、る、れ、ろ) even in Hikaru the anime.)
Do we have linguists here to shed more light on this?

[Kirby]

Similar to what Kirby said.
I thought the beginning consonant of (ら、り、る、れ、ろ), the English R sound, and the English L sound are all different from one another.
(In fact, one could detect different dialects of the beginning consonant of (ら、り、る、れ、ろ) even in Hikaru the anime.)
Do we have linguists here to shed more light on this?

A potential "linguistic approach" might be to analyze the sounds phonetically, perhaps starting with taking a look at the IPA for Japanese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Japanese). In particular, there are two symbols "ɽ", and "ɺ" to represent what I believe to be close to the sound used for "ら、り、る、れ、ろ":

The Japanese r varies between a postalveolar flap [ɽ] and an alveolar lateral flap [ɺ].

The corresponding pages have sound clips that you can use for listening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_flap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_lateral_flap

---

From this, I conclude the following:
1.) The 26-letter English alphabet is insufficient to represent the sounds used in Japanese, let alone other languages with more variance.
2.) IPA can give you a better hint as to how a sound really sounds in a particular language.
3.) Even with IPA, it can be difficult to absolutely ascertain native pronunciation in all cases.

Despite this, I feel that native speakers can generally understand your speech if you come close to correct pronunciation.

[EdLee]

...perhaps starting with taking a look at the IPA for Japanese...

Kirby, I agree with pretty much everything you said. But I'm less interested in the IPA (precisely because of the limitations you mentioned),
and more interested toward the directions of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_phonology
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskins_Laboratories

[Kirby]

Kirby, I agree with pretty much everything you said. But I'm less interested in the IPA (precisely because of the limitations you mentioned),
and more interested toward the directions of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_phonology
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskins_Laboratories

Hmm, I am interested in that, too.