Hawayo Takata sometimes wrote Leiki instead of Reiki. This seems to be a translation mistake. To pronounce the word Reiki in Japanese, it is necessary to forego any preconceptions about language that you may have. The first sound in ‘rei’ is neither an ‘R’ nor an ‘L’, as some believe. In Japanese the sound is in fact somewhere in between the two letters. The Japanese language has no correlation with English or its pronunciations. The kanji for ‘rei’ is officially spelt with an ‘R’ when translating into English and is therefore pronounced with an ‘R’ (even though the Japanese pronunciation might sound similar to what is understood as an ‘L’ in English).