Japanese Phonetics Episode 38—LIVE (Updated with native recordings!)
Added 2018-03-19 09:06:11 +0000 UTCBibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page
Good evening Patrons! The thirty-eighth episode of Japanese Phonetics is live, now updated with native recordings! In this lesson we look at some additional tips for vowel pronunciation, including vowel perception, reduction, centralization, and word-final long vowel shortening.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns with regards to this lesson, 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
Comments
The example that comes to mind first for me with this is 可愛い・怖い. Just looking at the words, you'd think they'd be easier to distinguish: it's either か or こ, there's length on い, accent is かわい\い vs こわ\い. But a very large number of people pronounce both words as basically /kəˈwɑɪ/. There's many things you could say about that, but for me anyway, the first thing is that /kə/ doesn't exist in Japanese. That's just not a sound. Pick one. It's either /a/ or /o/. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Ryan
2025-06-07 03:49:39 +0000 UTCHi, Trey. JP here, Dōgen's business partner. I'm helping manage the messages here on Patreon. I discussed your question with Dōgen, and he said he can’t speak to exactly where this phenomenon might be coming from or what it could be. We get a fair number of questions asking about anime in relation to pitch accent and phonetics. The series Dōgen has developed focuses on spoken Japanese in everyday life. The dialogue in anime is almost universally exaggerated, and does not reflect how people speak in real life. This example might be a bit exaggerated, but imagine using Mickey Mouse to study English pronunciation. The spoken dialogue might be correct grammar, but the voice and pronunciation are both exaggerated for the character, and if you used this to study how to speak English you would sound like a cartoon character. With a cartoon like Bugs Bunny, the difference between natural spoken language and the spoken language of the character is even greater. I know this doesn’t directly address your question, but I hope it helps!
Dogen
2024-10-21 01:56:30 +0000 UTCYou mentioned that any vowel will not be pronounced like the other, even in fast speech. In anime, some character tropes turn え into い (for example, くれ in くれる becomes くり); I know this is exaggerated, but where does this phenomenon come from?
Trey Smith
2024-10-19 16:49:45 +0000 UTCHi, Sam. JP here, Dōgen's business partner. I'm helping manage the messages here on Patreon. Thanks for the comment and for the suggestions!
Dogen
2023-05-19 00:53:15 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, Your videos are really helping me, thanks. When you give specific words that native English speakers get wrong, like 帰る and 走った it is really useful. I don’t know if you have time, but if you could add some extra examples in the comments that would be great. As an idea for a future video, something like a “top 10 native English speaker word mistakes” would be appreciated. Cheers, Sam
Sam Reid
2023-03-15 05:18:05 +0000 UTCHi, Gerrit! I’ve used Praat before, but not this particular feature you’ve mentioned. The vowel charts used in the lessons are based on the academic literature, which is based on native recordings. The native recordings in the lessons should help in your studies. (Vowels are covered mostly in lessons 35 through 39.)
Dogen
2022-08-24 08:35:35 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, thanks a lot for all these lessons. I'm jumping a bit and have not yet watched everything, so I'm not sure if you cover this topic. I recently saw that it's possible with e.g. Praat to create an own personal vowel chart and then compare that with native speakers. Do you have any experience with that and do you have any resources for vowel charts of actual native speakers? I find it very hard to try to pronounce matching sounds without any "hard" way to validate whether I'm doing it correctly.
Gerrit
2022-08-19 17:24:11 +0000 UTCIt's fascinating to hear the intentional 'correctly' wrong or foreign pronunciation of a real Japanese and immediately 'believing' that's a foreigner speaking even knowing it's not true. Makes me convinced that pitch accent training is very underrated among Japanese students including myself so far. I even have the eerie feeling that this is my own voice...
Eva
2022-04-20 00:08:29 +0000 UTCHi Thayakorn! In most cases this is just a sort of playful way of saying はい and not a form of centralization. Thus, it's usually OK to occasionally say ほい with friends, but it's not polite to say with people older than you, or in a position above your own. Cheers!
Dogen
2020-04-09 00:52:42 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, not sure if this has something to do with centralization or not but sometimes (if I'm not mistaken) I hear people say the word はい almost like ほい or おい. It sounded like they're just saying はい from their throat without changing the shape of the mouth at all (mouth almost closed in normal position), or slightly in the お position instead of the あ. Is this a common thing in Japanese?
T Rakwetpakorn
2020-04-08 12:59:39 +0000 UTCHi Virgilio! こちらこそ thanks for your support, I really appreciate it! It's funny that you mention 便利, I studied this specific word intensively for about two weeks during college because I knew I wasn't saying it correctly. We'll definitely be covering it in the future ^^ Incidentally just released a new lesson today—hope you find it useful. Thanks again!
Dogen
2018-04-04 09:55:49 +0000 UTCFinally caught up! Thanks for making these videos, especially the pitch accent parts were eye-opening for me and helped me a lot already. As a native Portuguese speaker I never really had trouble with vowels in Japanese, but I do sometimes catch a slight Portuguese accent when saying voiced consonants (and with ん, that one seems to change so much I can't really get the hang of it, especially when connected to an r sound like in 便利), so I'm very much looking forward to future episodes that can help me with that! Thanks again for your work :)
Virgilio Gruppelaar
2018-04-03 14:06:44 +0000 UTCHi Gilbert. Great question, and sorry for using confusing terms. You are correct—due to a combination of English stress-accent and vowel reduction, many Japanese learners will say 'huh-shitta' which is wrong, rather than 'ha-shitta', which is right. あ should definitely be voiced. Please let me know if this doesn't answer your question!
Dogen
2018-03-23 07:08:14 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, just want to make sure I'm understanding the problem in the はしった example. One might make the mistake of softening the は? Is this reduction caused by the 'sh' of し (turning more into hu-shitta instead of hah-shitta)? The あ sound in は should feel voiced, correct?
Gilbert Y
2018-03-23 06:20:25 +0000 UTCThank you very much Felix! I do indeed put in a lot of effort for each one, so your words really mean a lot. Please let me know if you ever have any questions, and good luck with your studies!
Dogen
2018-03-20 03:25:17 +0000 UTCCan I just say that I appreciate all the effort you put into these video lessons? It really shows and it’s makes learning that much easier for us. Keep up the great work!
Felix Wolf Blue
2018-03-20 02:28:43 +0000 UTC
