Remember that ん is one mora and should be vocalized as such. So if you’re practicing pronunciation by clapping, the number of claps should correspond to the number of kana in a given word.Īs most Japanese sounds are “consonant + vowel” pairs, the language itself sort of forces you to have a relatively consistent rhythm. In other words, one mora is basically one kana (excluding small kanas like the ょ in ぎょ). If you’ve tried shadowing Japanese speech, you might’ve seen that each of its mora (the building blocks of syllables) gets one beat and has the same length. Without further ado, let’s get started with the basics of Japanese phonology! 9 Key Things to Remember About Japanese Phonology 1.

Go spend a few minutes looking at the IPA pages for English and Japanese, and you’ll find that the two languages may have similar sounds but they’re not exactly identical. The reason all boils down to this: Japanese has sounds that don’t exist in English and vice versa. This all begs a question you’re probably thinking right now, given that you’ve decided to read an entire article about the subject: if Japanese pronunciation is so easy, why would someone devote time to studying the phonetics of Japanese-or what Webster’s English Language Learner Dictionary defines as “the study of speech sounds?” If you pronounce the Japanese vowels the way you do in Spanish, you’ll be just fine. It’s relatively easy for native speakers of languages like Spanish.Even someone who’s never studied Japanese before could read a text written in romaji and be understood without much trouble (unlike someone studying French, for example). Put in another way, words sound like they look and look like they sound. Spelling is phonetic and pronunciation is consistent.They both sound like “mai,” except the former has a falling then rising intonation, while the latter only has a falling intonation.

For example, the Chinese characters for “buy” and “sell” are 买 and 卖, respectively. It’s not like, say, Mandarin Chinese where the way you pronounce certain words changes their meaning and the character you use to write them. In fact, we only spent one class period on pronunciation for the following reasons: When I began studying Japanese, I was told that Japanese pronunciation was very easy. Japanese Has Pitch Accents (Just Like English!)ĭownload: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬan take anywhere. There Are Five Different “N” Sounds in Japanese し Doesn’t Sound Like ”She” (And Also You May Have to Learn Some Chinese) The Japanese “R” Is Very Different From the English One Differentiate the Japanese /h/, /ç/ and /ɸ/ Avoid Turning Single Japanese Vowels into English Diphthongs All Five Japanese Vowels Are Pronounced the Same

9 Key Things to Remember About Japanese Phonology.

If you manage to finish this article, you’ll have all the information you need to pick out the differences between こわい ( scary) and かわいい ( cute)-and then some. That was the moment I learned the value of Japanese phonetics and clear pronunciation. A few people started laughing, but luckily, my friend quickly spoke up in my defense, telling the teacher that no, she’s cute, she’s really cute: “いや！かわいいです！先生はかわいいですよ！ ( いや！かわいいです！せんせいはかわいいですよ！ )” Shocked, my teacher made what sounded like a choking sound. Trying not to look too relieved at the fact that it was an easy question, I nodded and responded: “うん。とっても怖いです！ ( うん。とってもこわいです！ )” Basically, I said: “Yeah, you’re incredibly scary!” As part of a grammar exercise, my teacher asked me a random question. It was a snowy day during my Japanese class in a small university in the middle of nowhere.

Let me tell you a quick, personal story that I think underscores the importance of learning Japanese phonology or phonetics. By Sami Nicholas Last updated: SeptemJapanese Phonology: The Ins and Outs of Japanese Sounds

English into japanese alphabet spelling