Phonetics Updates & Other Important Announcements!

Good evening, Patrons!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have released the ground-up remake of Japanese Phonetics 5.1, the lesson on Japanese voice and speaking style (previously noted as 'vocal placement'), especially in comparison to American English voice and speaking style. This lesson is a bit different from other lessons, and while quite anecdotal, I feel this can help open your ears to some of the major differences in vocal quality between Japanese and other languages.

Japanese Phonetics 5.1

There are also five other updates I wanted to let everyone know about:

1. I previously covered this 'vocal placement' primarily across two lessons, lesson 34, and lesson 39. After publishing the above lesson, I removed all information on vocal placement from these two lessons, as I believe I explain the topic in a much better way in the newer lesson. In addition to this, I edited certain bits of 34 to better reflect my current thoughts on default jaw placement and tongue position in Japanese. To summarize things here, in the previous version of the lesson I had said that the default position of the tongue in Japanese is high, but this is only true for the body of the tongue, and only relatively. Furthermore, in the previous version of the lesson I said that by default, the tongue was more relaxed than in English, but I now believe this is only true for the tip of the tongue, and not the body of the tongue—in Japanese the body (particularly the back bits) of the tongue may actually be more tensed than it is in English. That said, I I feel that worrying about tongue tension in general is a very confusing and unintuitive topic, so I opted to remove this section of the lesson entirely. For my current thoughts on default tongue position in Japanese, please see the graphic in the 'tongue' section of lesson 34.

2. It's no longer listed anywhere, but later on in this series (particularly in lessons 35 and beyond), I sometimes say example words with a bit too much nasality. As I'm currently working to replace essentially all my own example word recordings in this series with high quality native recordings, this shouldn't be a big issue in the future, but if you are currently going through the later lessons, this is a good thing to be aware of. Japanese isn't an overly nasal language, even if I sometimes say example words in an overly nasal manner—this is simply one of my own bad speaking habits. When available, always use native recordings rather than my own.

3. Patron Richy has created an ANKI pitch-accent flash card deck which he kindly offered to share with everyone. According to Richy, "I created a very simple pitch accent deck of the 1000 most common Japanese words that I use for some daily vocab shadowing. I included audio files from Forvo, double checked the patterns with my NHK accent jiten, and gone through the entire deck once to make sure there aren't any mistakes." The ANKI deck can be found here, or downloaded from the link at the bottom of this post.

4. Because I believe it's most important for me to concentrate on creating the highest quality phonetics lessons as possible, going forward I'll be having my business partner JP and another qualified Japanese teacher I've been working with recently handle most of your pitch-accent and pronunciation related questions. The Japanese teacher's name is Kimi, and when replying to your comments, she'll write '-Kimi' such that everyone knows where their answer is coming from.

5. I've adjusted the estimated release dates for three Japanese Phonetics lessons I'm currently remaking from the ground up. When creating the initial release dates for these lessons, I very foolishly forgot to factor in my daughters' summer holiday, which will last approximately one month. For the new estimated release dates of these lessons, please refer to the index page, which can be found here. I'll continue to update the other lessons in the series with high quality native recordings while working on these ground-up remakes.

I believe that's everything! Thank you all very much for your continued support, and best of luck with your future Japanese studies!

Dōgen