Episode 4: Phonetic Awareness and Useful Practices (Patreon)

IMPORTANT NOTE: In this episode I recommend people record themselves speaking Japanese. While I do believe this is an extremely effective way to notice and fix errors in one's speech, it's also something that I only recommend people do if they've been studying Japanese fairly intensely for a minimum of six months, if not closer to a year. This is because if you immediately begin recording yourself from day one of your Japanese studies, you'll almost certainly be overwhelmed in terms of how many things there are to correct. Because you've just started studying the language, it's natural to be making a lot of errors—if you try to address every one of these issues immediately, it will actually end up taking more time away from the more important initial practice of 'developing an ear for the language'. That is to say, it's best to spend the first six months, if not year of your Japanese studies doing as much native input as possible such that you have a basic 'feel' of the language, and then to start recording yourself and analyzing these recordings after this. With this method, not only will you make far less mistakes to begin with, as you'll have a much better ear for the language, you'll also be much better at figuring out exactly what you need to do to fix your mistakes, again, as a result of understanding the basic sounds and rhythm of the language. For more information on this topic, please see this video I created with Matt from Matt vs. Japan.

Bibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page

皆さんこんばんは！

In this episode I lay out some exercises and useful practices for developing your sense of phonetic awareness. I hope that everyone is able to learn a few things from this!

Movie / Drama recommendations in this episode are:

• "Orange Days" / オレンジデイズ (First two episodes)

• Tokyo Sonata / 東京ソナタ (Full movie)

• 12 Kind Japanese / 十二人の優しい日本人（Full movie）

Feel free to leave questions or comments below. As mentioned in the video, this is the last episode addressing my language philosophy and approach to foreign language acquisition—the basics of Japanese pitch accent will be introduced in episode 5!

Thank you for your support!

Dōgen