[cellularmitosis]

I think its worth adding some additional phonetic context around this remark (I made a similar remark and my coworkers thought I was making a racist joke).

The reason native Japanese speakers struggle with "R" and "L" sounds is because they just have one phoneme to work with, which sounds (to a native English speaker) like a combination of "R", "L", and "D". If you aren't exposed to phonemes at a young age, it is difficult to expand your set later in life.

An analogous difficulty might exist for English speakers if a Chinese company came up with two product names which used the exact same sequence of syllables, but had "tonal" differences in pronunciation.