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Submit your Pronunciation Questions! (Patreon)

Published:
2019-02-06 06:24:44
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Good afternoon Patrons! 

Just wanted to remind everyone that the next Japanese Phonetics lesson with be a pronunciation Q&A, so if anyone has any specific concerns related to pronunciation, please feel free to leave a comment below and I'll be sure to answer it in the video. In the case there aren't too many comments here, I'll address common questions and miscellaneous issues I have been asked about multiple times in the past. Thank you for your continued support, and talk to you all again soon!

Best from Beppu,

Dogen

Comments

Judas BH

Hello! I am very keen to hear about what genitive の does to pitch accent. I think you mentioned that it was a bit complex once earlier in this series. Thank you and best wishes dogen!! (also please wish me luck for my JET CIR interview~)

Nicolas Guillemot

This is kind of an abstract general question... but how do you know the difference between "I'm pronouncing it wrong" and "this is just what my voice sounds like"? Thoughts? Anecdotes? I don't know if there's much more we can do than just try our best.

Renee di Cherri

I'm a huge newb with Japanese, and somewhat new to your Patreon. So - sorry if you have explained this. What is with the dropped vowels at the end?! How can I know? The simplest example is です = "des". I can remember to always just drop that u. But then new words, especially katakana make me nuts. As an example アイスクリーム messes me up, because in my american reading I want to say MUUUU at the end. But it's more like M(u). The tiniest u. Help appreciated in understanding :)

Nic Hartmann

First, thank you for doing this! Q: How can I improve my natural sense of "timing" (in the prosodic sense) for geminate phonemes in Japanese? I have a habit of sustaining them far longer than a native speaker would. It's particularly frustrating for me because Japanese has so many jukugo words like 国境(こっきょう）、東京都（とうきょうちょう）、本能（ほんのう）for example that I just botch terribly. These words highlight the sticky geminate-phoneme situations that cause me the most trouble: word medial geminate consonants like in けっこう, strands of CVV clusters like in とうきょうちょう, and geminate nasals like in ほんのう。I also get tripped up with words that have varying prosody like きょうかしょ (2, 1, 1) or 自動販売機（じどうはんばいき) (1, 2, 2, 2, 1). For lack of a better metaphor, speaking Japanese is kind of like playing an instrument--you have to get the pitch-accent correct for every word, and also get the timing of the piece as a whole. Thanks again for doing this! I know it must be tedious answering repeat questions, but it’s hard for new students to dig through the wealth of material to find their answers sometimes. You’re a real Japanese phonetics hero. P.S. thanks for putting up with all my amateur linguistics-speak.

Julie Saraceno

I already saw someone post about repetitive らりるれろ so I will ask something different. Would you be able to go over pronunciation with a word like あらわれる. Ive found that pronouncing the -らわれ portion of the word to be extremely difficult

Nathan Vegdahl

I'm increasingly curious about dialects of Japanese other than standard Tokyo Japanese. In particular, I'm going to be spending a good bit of time in southern Touhoku, but I'm having a lot of difficulty finding good resources on the dialects in that area. Do you know any good resources for studying the pronunciation of non-standard dialects of Japanese? Or do you have any advice for pursuing other dialects in general?

julien

Hello, This question has already been asked, but just to say that I'm interested too by the answer. When you record yourself, how can you tell the difference "I pronounce it wrong" and "this is just how I sound", Sometimes I'm not really sure. Thanks a lot

Michael B. McLaughlin
>>19622558

I think it is addressed in one of the lessons. Basically, when an unvoiced consonant is followed by an unvoiced consonant, certain vowel sounds (i, u) attached to the mora that forms the first pair of morae are "dropped". です is a bit unique in that it will still typically be pronounced as des even when followed by, e.g. ね. But I'm just summarizing my own knowledge. It's linguistically much more complicated than that. But as a general starting point for observation, you'll find that many situations where the vowel sound seems to drop out occur in the situations I described above.

Michael B. McLaughlin
>>19623309

An example of gemination from English that may help is "back court", as in, "oh, that game is being played on the back court". Compare that to "oh, that's tobacco". For me, at least, there is a noticeable gemination with back court versus tobacco. Hope that helps.

Michael B. McLaughlin

Given an English word that has not been adopted into Japanese, e.g. a proper name (personal, location, brand), is it better to try to modify its pronunciation to match how it would be pronounced if it was adopted into Japanese or should it be pronounced as it would be in English?

tensaimon

A little bit related to the こっから　どっか phenomenon (maybe) but can you give some clarification on how to pronounce あたたかい and it's conjugations (暖かかった and 暖かくなかった) in rapid or casual speech. I feel sure some of those たs and かs must get dropped somewhere but my wonderwife strongly denied that my 昨日あったかった was something natives say (and I must bow to her native intuition)

Miles Gard

I'd love a rundown on ヤンキー phonetics and pitch accent; things like the 〜さい to ~せー change, or なんだよ〜 sounding more like なんだえ〜 etc. Note: obviously this isn't *entirely* a serious suggestion, so if it doesn't make the cut, I won't be devastated. That said, "how to speak like a yankee" is a subject virtually uncovered and if anyone could teach it, you're definitely the man for the job.

Dogen
>>19643429

Hi Miles. I'll probably skip this one this time around, but may do a dedicated lesson to this topic in the future. Cheers!

TheHighDinosaur

Hi dogen. I'd really like to get a clear understanding on how pitch accent woks for verbs following te the te form. For example, 食べてしまう and 食べちゃう - does the simau/chau all attach low since tabete is atamadaka? How would it work for heiban verbs like 教える? Would it attach high since shimau is heiban? Further, 食べている and 食べています. iru is heiban but from listening it seems to attach low, but im not sure im hearing it right. Should treat it like two words and have TAbeteiRU? Or should i treat it like the compound verb general rule and apply the downstep on [-3] i.e. taBETEiru. What about the teimasu form? Does the 'masu form pitch accent the same across all verbs' rule hold and make it taBETEIMAsu? or does the teimasu attach low like TAbeteimasu. If you could go over the teiru teiku teoku tearu tekuru etc + masu form pitch accent rules i would be eternally grateful.

Dogen
>>19653604

Hi Sami! Thanks for the question. Sorry for not being clear about this, but the upcoming Q&A is meant to be about pronunciation, as opposed to pitch-accent. Thus, I probably won't be able to address your question in the next video, but after this lesson I'll be switching back to pitch-accent and concentrating on advanced concepts, so I actually think this would make a great topic for one of those episodes. If you're able to wait a bit I should be able to cover things in detail! ^^ Apologies for the delay and thank you for your support!

Timothy Chambers

Hopping on Nathan's dialect question, could you talk briefly about what cultural associations Japanese people have with different regional accents? For example, I've heard that speaking Touhoku-ben makes one seem like a country bumpkin. And, do Japanese people intentionally adopt regional accents to evoke a certain mood, like I might start using "y'all" and drawling a bit if I want to come across as casual and folksy? Thanks!

Tao Cumplido

Not really a question, but maybe you can talk about rendaku. Although I guess that would be a topic for a whole video.

Dogen
>>19794640

Hi Tao! Unfortunately I received this message about an hour after I finished recording, so I wasn’t able to address it. As you mentioned, however, rendaku would be a good topic for an entire video as it’s so complicated. Will try to make a lesson about this in the future! Thanks!

Walt Poor

As near as I can determine, the numbers 零, ゼロ, 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九, and 十 are either 頭高 or 尾高. So how should they be combined? For example, what would the pitch patterns be for 46, 83, 752 and 1839? And looking ahead to bigger numbers, is there anything special about the pitch patterns for the numbers 万 and higher?

Dogen
>>20280231

Hi Walt! Numbers are actually incredibly complex—I don't yet understand many of the rules, so it's difficult for me to answer your question at this point. That said, I plan on doing a lesson about this in the near future, and thus will do a considerable amount of research on the topic; I should be able to answer this question in the next month or so! Apologies for the delay, and thank you for your continued support.

Walt Poor

Sorry about this, but it's time for my latest weird question of the day. At different times I seem to hear different pitches for the word 結構. For example, it seems to have different pitches in the sentences はい、結構です。 and いいえ、結構です。 Is this correct, or are my ears fooling me again? And if there really are different pitches in these cases, are there many words with context-dependent pitches? Are there any rules which I might understand?

Dogen
>>20460555

Hi Walt! In both of these instances the word should be pronounced as a KEkkou, with the downstep on the first mora. That said, this initial change in pitch will change based on exactly how much the speaker is trying to emphasize the meaning of the word. In other words, いいえ、結構です, could mean, "No thank you, I'm fine." or "Didn't I tell you to stop already?", depending on just how clearly the speaker articulates the word. For more information on sentence level pitch accent and pitch-accent variations, I encourage you to check out lessons 25-29, which can be found here: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/16489306">https://www.patreon.com/posts/16489306</a> Thank you!

Walt Poor

I have two questions about things you have probably covered, but which I cannot find in my notes. First: I think I saw the たがる form in one of your lectures, but now I can't find it. Where do you talk about it? Second: What happens when いる is attached to the て form of a verb? For example, 持っている and 話している.

Dogen
>>21246137

Hi Walt, Thanks for the questions. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly when I talked about the たがる form, and because there are currently 59 lessons I sadly don't have time to locate the exact lesson at this moment. If I remember correctly, however, I think I may have only mentioned it in passing, as in "We'll talk about the たがる" form in an upcoming lesson, rather than addressing it outright. With regards to your second question, いる will attach low when a downstep has occurred in the verb before it, so it will attach low to both 持って and 話して, as both have downsteps, and it will attach high to 平板 verbs. Hope that this helps! Cheers!

Walt Poor

Hi. A few months ago I asked about the pitch patterns for numbers like 46, 83, 752 and 1839. You replied that you hoped "... to answer this question in the next month or so!" Have you posted a lesson on this topic yet? Similarly for the question about the たがる" form. Thanks,

Dogen
>>22967918

Hi Walt, the downstep occurs on が in the たがる form, regardless of the pitch-accent of the original verb. I haven't been able to cover numbers yet as this is a combined topic that I need to further research, but I plan on starting to cover them in lesson 65 (the next lesson will be 63, for your reference). Apologies for the multiple delays and thank you for your support!