Speaking clear-cut English is the goal pursued by many Koreans. Many parents spend a lot of money to send their children to English kindergartens. Recently, there is a trend of taking children to do tongue plastic surgery. Speaking the tongue is more flexible and can speak English freely and fluently, instead of distinguishing R and L sounds.

The private clinic for this operation is concentrated in an upscale shopping area in Seoul. A surgeon said that he had to do 10 cases of tongue plastic surgery every month on average, and almost all the patients were children under 5 years old. But he denied that it was cosmetic surgery, because some cases showed that a few people really needed surgery to pronounce correctly.

The most common tongue plastic surgery is to remove the frenulum under the base of the tongue to make the tongue longer so as to easily touch the upper jaw. If the tongue is too short to reach the upper jaw, some English pronunciations will be difficult. Tongue frenectomy only takes 10 minutes, and there is no need to be hospitalized. The cost of the operation is between 230 and 400 dollars.

Zhong Daoguang, an otolaryngologist, said that if the tongue is too short, it is impossible to pronounce English R and L accurately. If you can have surgery before the age of 5, it will really help improve your child's pronunciation function, but such patients are rare. Among the children brought by their parents for surgery, less than 1? 10。

Linguists do not agree with the statement that many Koreans attribute poor English pronunciation to short tongues. A professor of linguistics at Seoul National University said that westerners are tall and big, and their tongues may be longer than those of orientals, but tongue lacing surgery can only increase their tongues by one or two millimeters, which is of no help at all. The real problem is that there is no clear distinction between R and L in Korean.