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Japanese Phonetics Episode 57—LIVE! (Patreon)

Published:
2019-02-15 05:26:00
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

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Good afternoon Patrons! The fifty-seventh episode of Japanese Phonetics is live! In this lesson I answer Patron-submitted pronunciation questions, covering topics such as consecutive R sounds, the perception of regional dialects, and timing.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns with regards to this lesson, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below. Thank you very much for your continued support, and good luck with your Japanese studies!

Best from Beppu,

Dōgen

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Japanese Phonetics #57: Pronunciation Q&A

The fifty-seventh episode of Japanese Phonetics, my series dedicated to Japanese pitch-accent and pronunciation. In this lesson I answer Patron-submitted pronunciation questions, covering topics such as consecutive R sounds, the perception of regional dialects, and timing. If you have any questions leave a comment below, and thank you all for your continued support! Bibliography: https://www.patreon.com/posts/17345632

Comments

Nathan Vegdahl

Thanks for answering my question, Dogen! Since I'll be in Touhoku for a while, the immersion approach should work just fine for me. Maybe I'll try writing up some resources of my own based on my experiences there. I can try to be an investigative linguist! ;-)

Nic Hartmann

Who would've guessed that my timing issues were related to pitch-accent!? You're a bloody ripper, Dogen. Thank you very much.

Nick Ball

Hey Dogen. I just have a question about something that linked in my head earlier. I'm not done, but I'm almost caught up to now in your series, but recently you said something about aspirating less for some sounds. (I think you were going over the t sounds.) I also remember hearing Kaz say, in one of his videos, something on the lines of Japanese people not taking a breath before they speak, unlike English speaking people do. Is there a link between those two pieces of information?

Meme

とても勉強になりました。次回も楽しみにしています。(-;

Dogen
>>19904780

No worries Nathan! Hope that it goes well. Consider making a YouTube series about it ^^

Dogen
>>19914909

Hi Nick! I don't believe so. I strongly feel that the 'breathing' element has to do with not interrupting the person speaking; to me it feels much more like a cultural thing than a linguistic phenomenon. It may also be worth noting that there are many non-aspirated sounds in English as well, such as the K in 'skip', as opposed to the K in 'kilt', and yet we, as native-English speakers do this 'inhale-sound' regularly. Hope that this helps! ^^

vzwGrey

When talking about the の turning words into Heiban you said "we CAN pronounce it as". So does that mean the Heiban accent is completely optional? Or is there are tendency towards using it?

Dogen
>>19933538

Hi Grey. I was indeed taught that this is is something that not all natives of standard Japanese do, and something that even individual speakers don’t always regularly do. Will be talking about this more in the near future after doing a bit more research across my books. Cheers!

tensaimon

Very interesting, thanks for the clarification on 温かい, that's the conclusion I had come to too but it's great to hear a good clear model to practice with. Also, I'm currently working on a youtube project myself and I can definitely attest that hearing myself so many times while editing just keeps throwing up more and more non-native sounding pronunciations....I'm resisting the urged to e-record all the time tho, if i go down that rabbithole I will never complete anything ever, instead I'm just filing a lot of them away for future reference, hopefufllyt my pronunciation will improve as time goes on...

寝無理 Nemuri

Something to throw into the 配偶者 pacing bit, I practice weird spaced out words while tapping like a metronome. 1234 1234 配偶者4 1234 I checked this on the part where you repeat it, you have a great sense of rhythm lol

Dogen
>>29220090

I've done stuff like this as well in the past, is generally very effective! Cheers!

Matt

I am not sure if this is the right thread in which to ask this question, but I have always been curious how long vowel in the end of a word will impact the accent and also how "long" the long vowel should actually be. Take 文章（うんしょう）vs　文書（ぶんしょ）as examples, both are 頭高. In うんしょう, as the pitch usually goes down, the sound fades away, the final う seems almost inaudible, how does one distinguish that from ぶんしょ then? Also, I notice a generally pattern that if the word has a long vowel in the end, it is usually not 頭高. 文章（うんしょう）obviously is an exception to this "rule". What are your thoughts on these issues? Sorry I am not as articulate as you are using these phonetic terms, I hope you still get the gist of what I am trying to convey though. Thank you in advance.

Dogen
>>39275479

Hi Matt. The first thing that I would say is that I would try to avoid drawing conclusions based on the patterns you've observed, unless it has already been documented in academic literature; there have been many instances when I thought I was observing a trend only to find out it wasn't the case and then I had to backtrack later. For these reasons, I don't believe it would be wise for me to comment on the pattern that you've noticed, as again I don't want to potentially spread bad information. With regards to your first point, this can certainly be very tricky, especially in everyday speech in which long vowels are often dropped, and this is something that I've struggled with myself. That said, I have noticed that the words which don't end with a long vowel, such as 文書, often feel slightly 'punchier' to me (anecdotal, take with a grain of salt as I'm a native English speaker and may simply be perceiving this difference), and that this allows me to distinguish between the two to a certain degree in rapid speech. I would encourage you to perhaps try and think about the words this way and see if it helps at all; I unfortunately can't offer much additional advice on this topic because when final long vowels are dropped there are certainly instances in which the two words literally are identical, and thus the only way to tell the two apart is by context. Hope that this helps a little bit!