Discussing Japanese phonetics with linguist Yoichi Mukai!
Added 2020-10-05 06:25:14 +0000 UTCGood afternoon Patrons! I hope that this post finds you well. A couple days ago I interviewed Yoichi Mukai, a trained Japanese linguist and faculty member in the Department of Modern Languages at Vancouver Island University. In this video, we discuss vocal-placement, fundamental frequency, hyper-correctness, and many other topics. I hope that everyone is able to learn from this interview! Thank you to Yoichi-san to lending us his valuable time and energy. Incidentally, Yoichi-san's qualifications can be found at his homepage, linked below.
I'd like to also let everyone know that I've also just updated Lesson 11 (the first Japanese Pitch-accent test) with native recordings, and also changed just a couple of the words in the video such that the test would be more practical; if you haven't taken the test in a while, now would be a good time to re-check your listening abilities!
As usual, if anyone has any questions or concerns with regards to this post, feel free to leave a comment below!
Best from Beppu,
Dōgen
Comments
It's interesting you say that because the origin of Indo-European language R's is from both Proto-Indo-European r and z.
Doug Urayama
2020-10-18 01:13:56 +0000 UTCFor what it's worth, many languages map a z-like sound to the letter r. The most famous example is Mandarin Chinese
Kelvin T Nguyen
2020-10-10 20:31:41 +0000 UTCThanks for the tip!
Dogen
2020-10-06 11:55:45 +0000 UTCFrom a russian point of view - string of 'R's is easy to pronounce if you keeping air flow constant. I found that many english speakers tend to stop voice when pronouncing hard 'R'.
Strange Guy
2020-10-06 11:41:22 +0000 UTCHi Danilo! I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to—can you tell me what you mean by 'being a big issue in Japanese'? Are you talking about it being difficult to understand certain dialects? Thank you!
Dogen
2020-10-06 00:25:05 +0000 UTCWhat a coincidence! Yes, he actually reached out to me, so as you can imagine I was very interested in interviewing him for the series!
Dogen
2020-10-06 00:24:11 +0000 UTCThat's great Dogen! I'm surprised you got in contact with Yoichi. I was a research participant in his work at the University of Alberta when I started my undergrad.
Tyler Cochrane
2020-10-05 22:20:04 +0000 UTCAs you know, we have a lot of people speaking English in the world and in a multitude of accents. However, this multitude of accents does not appear to be an issue with English. Why would accent be such a big issue with Japanese? Would that be because Japanese has only 50 sounds? I never dared to count how many sounds English has, but I tried to count the sounds of my native tongue and I stopped when I reached 300. By the way, I have heard a lot of non-native speaking my native tongue and their accent are seldom a problem.
Danilo Janune
2020-10-05 13:26:27 +0000 UTCVery interesting topics
Markas
2020-10-05 08:40:54 +0000 UTC
