Japanese Phonetics Episode 33 Follow-up—LIVE (Updated with native recordings!)
Added 2017-12-28 17:59:47 +0000 UTCBibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page
Hello, Patrons! I hope this message finds you all well. The Japanese Phonetics Episode 33 follow-up is live, now updated with native recordings! In this relatively brief lesson, we continue to explore devoicing, going over Patron-submitted questions and looking at concepts such as 'dropping'.
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
Comments
Hi, Trainfan1055. JP here, Dōgen's business partner. I'm helping manage the messages here on Patreon. Music can be good for some aspects of language learning, but because of the way singers change their voice to work with the music it's not ideal for studying pitch accent or pronunciation. That said—and understand I am also not a music person, so this is a crude attempt at explaining my thoughts—I think it's probably similar to singing vs. rapping in English, where singing is working with the melody and rhythm, while rap is a little more focused on the rhythm or beat. I also get the feeling that the approach to the rhythm is different for each, which could account for what you're hearing. In the end, though, to paraphrase some of Dōgen's comedic videos: If you want to *sing* Japanese, study Japanese songs. If you want to *speak* Japanese, study spoken Japanese. Hope this helps!
Dogen
2024-11-12 00:43:06 +0000 UTCI listen to a lot of Japanese music (and I mean, a lot!) and I've noticed that devoiced い and うare often voiced in slow songs (which messed up my accent) and that this doesn't happen as often in rap songs, even in slow rap songs. My guess is that this is because rap is more like talking, but to the beat of the music, and other songs involve a lot of "holding a note" or something. (I'm not a music expert, so I don't know the correct terminology)
Trainfan1055
2024-11-10 15:07:30 +0000 UTCHi, Anthony. JP here, Dōgen's business partner. I'm helping manage the messages here on Patreon. I've been having problems with Patreon notifications and just came across your comment. Apologies for the wait! You might find some information on what you're hearing in some of the other lessons in the pronunciation sub-series, like lesson 45 ("The small 'tsu' AKA the sokuon") and 49 ("The 'b' and 'p' sounds"). If you want to hear native examples, you can use Youglish to pull up a list of videos. This should give you a good idea of what トップ sounds like. https://youglish.com/pronounce/トップ/japanese? I hope this helps!
Dogen
2024-03-08 10:00:23 +0000 UTCIf P is a voiceless consonant, should words likeトップ be pronounced "topp?" I'm finding it hard to do that.
Anthony
2023-11-22 01:20:01 +0000 UTCHi Atsuyas! Thank you for signing up—very glad to hear that you enjoyed the video. I should have explained things better. Essentially, い and う will almost always get devoiced between voiceless consonants (minus the exceptions I lay out in the public video, among a couple of other things), but when it comes to the end of words, at least in my experience, there are just slightly more exceptions. This is why I only partially colored in the い for the slower speech example. Again, in normal conversation the ち will get devoiced at the end of 毎日 before コンビニ, but if there is a significant pause here, then it's treated less like a 'middle of the word devoicing' and more like 'end of the word devoicing', which again is more of a gray zone. I think that while devoicing is still very, very likely to occur even when there is a pause, it's in my experience just slightly less likely to occur than if it was in the middle of a word between voiceless consonants. Thus, I would say go for devoicing, even with a pause in this example, just know that it's a bit more regular in the middle of words (between voiceless consonants). Hope that this helps!
Dogen
2021-06-07 11:52:06 +0000 UTCHi Dogen! I'm a new patreon and I'd like to first thank you for your amazing work. Your video on devoicing instantly made a huge impact on my spoken Japanese and I just couldn't afford not being a patreon after seeing how effective your teaching was. I had a quick question related to your devoicing follow-up. You state that devoicing happens in 毎日コンビニに行く when said rapidly but not in 毎日、コンビニに行く due to the pause that the comma introduces. At the end of the video though, there is a reminder which states "い and う are devoiced [...] when they are preceded by a voiceless consonant and followed by a pause". Shouldn't then devoicing occurs in 毎日、コンビニに行く as い is preceded by a voiceless consonant and followed by pause? I wonder if I misunderstood something or if this is something that you explained in a later video as I have yet to watch most of them.
Atsuyas
2021-06-07 11:19:12 +0000 UTCHi Benoit! That's not a stupid question at all! Technically speaking devoicing shouldn't occur in ですね, but I have heard some people say the す in this set with devoicing. I think this is because the devoiced pronunciation of です is so mainstream at this point that it sometimes spills over into places where it shouldn't technically occur. Thus, I think the best way to answer your question would be to say that normally the す in ですね is not devoiced, and according to the books it shouldn't ever get devoiced, but in reality it is occasionally devoiced (at least in my own experience). Cheers!
Dogen
2021-05-28 01:49:06 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, thanks for your work, it is really helpful! Sorry if my question sounds stupid as I'm still a complete beginner. Does the "end of the word" devoicing happens when the following word begin with a voiced consonnant? Maybe "ですね" could be an example. Sorry for my English, it can't be an excuse hearing your japanese level, but I'm not a native speaker. ありがとうございます。
Benoit
2021-05-26 16:00:11 +0000 UTCHi Tyler! Typically yes!
Dogen
2020-03-07 07:15:48 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, I've got one quick question. Do words that have a っ between the letters that would lead to devoicing still get devoiced? For example, would the し in しっている get devoiced?
Tyler Davis
2020-03-07 06:28:42 +0000 UTCHi 鼠耳モード, Thanks for the question. This is something that I've looked into, but it doesn't seem to happen often or 'reliably' enough to be described with any simple rule. Labrune has a small passage about this in his book, referring to ここから becoming こっから, but again there aren't any remarks about this occurring reliably with other words or word combinations with similar pronunciation. That said, I do intend on covering everyday words which geminate this way in a future lesson, but it'll more or less be a simple list. Sorry for not being much help here, and thank you for the support!
Dogen
2018-07-19 03:25:50 +0000 UTCDogen, How prevalent is the apparent preference to geminate, rather than devoice, the first of two voiceless consonants (「く 」 plus another k sound, for example) in casual speech? One example would be 洗濯機 (せんたくき) pronounced 「せんたっき」, which actually seems to be the more common pronunciation, at least if the times I have heard it and Forvo are anything to go by; with Forvo having 「せんたっき」 for five out of six individual pronunciations (one is actually both spoken sequentially) [<a href="https://forvo.com/word/洗濯機" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://forvo.com/word/洗濯機</a>]. I began wondering more about this after encountering an alternative pronunciation of a word for which I had not heard one before, 著作権 (ちょさくけん), in this podcast: <a href="https://youtu.be/tHnz6d-vR_g" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/tHnz6d-vR_g</a> where the speakers almost every time say 「ちょさっけん」; although, interestingly, they do occasionally pronounce it 「ちょさくけん」. Thank you very much for your time.
鼠耳モード （Ｌｉｍ）
2018-07-18 07:33:40 +0000 UTCHi NIkitai, Thank you very much for the kind message! I really appreciate the support, and thrilled to hear that you find the series useful. Hope that you can find an informed language partner soon, but in the meantime if you have any questions feel free to let me know!
Dogen
2018-01-06 07:08:41 +0000 UTCI just wanted to say thank you for all of your hard work, you are an inspiration to me. Live long and happy life! Unfortunately, I had to get all of these by myself, too bad there wasn't a person who would help me like you're helping people nowadays... Looking forward to the next videos.
Nikita Grebennikov
2018-01-04 15:45:16 +0000 UTCHi Bertrand, Thanks for the post! As you noted I intentionally left this out of the video for practical purposes, but it's certainly an interesting topic. I actually originally planned on covering aspiration as well with words like skip vs. kip, but the script became far too long haha. I hope some of the learners whose native language is not English will be able to learn from your informed post. Cheers!
Dogen
2018-01-03 03:44:15 +0000 UTCSorry for the long message, but I wanted to point something out for those of us who are particularly interested in the topic of devoicing. Mind you, this is something that you probably intentionally left out/simplified in the video for practical purposes (and that was definitely the right call), but here goes: when you state at 4:13 that the only difference between "T" and "D" is that the former is unvoiced and the latter is voiced, that's not entirely true. Not in every language anyway, and not at the syllable level (vs. isolated consonants). It's the key differentiator for a native English speaker to be sure, but it's not the only one, and it's not even a relevant one in some languages. The other differentiator is aspiration: the letter "T" in English is aspirated, while the letter "D" is not. Though it would be subtle and pretty much impossible to say without whispering, you could technically say an unvoiced “D” without turning it into a “T”. Depending on one's linguistic background, it can be hard not to treat aspiration as just another word for voicing/devoicing; the only reason I realized its existence and its importance so keenly is because my first language is French, I used to study Mandarin Chinese, and I have Chinese friends who speak French as a second language. French, unlike English and even Japanese, doesn't feature aspiration much, if at all, while Mandarin Chinese is all about aspirated vs. un-aspirated consonants. To a Chinese speaker, it's extremely difficult to distinguish between the French words "gâteau" (pronounced "ga-to") and "cadeau" (pronounced "ka-do") because the French letters k/g and t/d are equally un-aspirated. In Chinese, however, the only real difference between k and g (when you transcribe Chinese sounds to Latin letters using the pinyin system), and between t and d, is that k and t should be aspirated while g and d should not be. But because such a distinction doesn’t exist in French syllables with the k/g and t/d pairings, the words "gâteau" and "cadeau", to a Chinese ear sound exactly the same. If, on the other hand, I started saying those two French words the way an English speaker might say them, a Chinese speaker would have no problem telling the two apart because an English speaker with a thick English accent would aspirate the French k and the French t. They would introduce a phonological feature of English that isn’t normally there in French but makes sense to a Chinese ear. To rephrase, speaking from experience, Chinese speakers trying to speak French can and will often struggle tell those letters apart in listening and production even though the differences are so obvious to us native speakers of Western languages. How could you not hear the difference between “k” and “g”, right? Well, it just so happens that voicing and devoicing are not relevant concepts in Chinese phonetics, and aspiration is relevant but doesn’t exist in French; voicing/devoicing can't be a differentiator in Chinese, even for seemingly obvious cases like k/g and t/d. The key difference between “t” and “d” in Chinese is not that one is unvoiced and the other is voiced, but that the former is aspirated and the latter is not. That's because, I assume, every single syllable in Chinese needs to be voiced and emphasized to some degree anyway in order to accommodate Chinese tones, which are so integral to understanding the meaning of a word. After all, you couldn't put a tone on a syllable if the consonant made you devoice the vowel, but you can put a tone on it regardless of whether the preceding consonant is aspirated or not. Bringing this back to Japanese, the pitch accent system isn’t so crucial that people wouldn’t understand you if you got the pitch accent of a word wrong, so it makes sense that you can afford to devoice an entire syllable even when the syllable happens to be a downstep, as you pointed out in the last part of the video. Anyway, again, this is in no way meant as a criticism or correction. These paragraphs I just typed are of no value to this lesson whatsoever. This is just some broader phonetics musings I figured you and other patrons might find interesting.
Toberu
2018-01-02 23:33:21 +0000 UTCNik, Not Dogen (obviously) but that sounds like a normal "う" sound to me. The confusion probably arises over that the Japanese "う" sound is similar, but not identical to the English "oo" sound found in words like "do". Compare u and ɯ on an IPA vowel chart: <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:International_Phonetic_Alphabet" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:International_Phonetic_Alphabet</a>#Vowels And some recordings. One for the IPA u: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AClose_back_rounded_vowel.ogg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AClose_back_rounded_vowel.ogg</a> And one for "う": <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AJa-U.oga" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AJa-U.oga</a> For more detail, I am sure Dogen will cover differences in vowel and consonant differences between Japanese and English in a future video.
Erik Alexander Olson
2018-01-02 20:25:57 +0000 UTCHi Dogen! I've extracted a few seconds of audio as an example of 'A desu, B dese': <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/ksocb4bre7z5ttu/dese.m4a?dl=0" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.dropbox.com/s/ksocb4bre7z5ttu/dese.m4a?dl=0</a> - quite noticeably for me the 2nd girl uses 'dese' (but a standard -します at the end). In lieu of a proper citation: this sample is from episode 1 of the anime 魔法科高校の劣等生. Thanks in advance, Nik
Niklas Michalopulos
2018-01-02 10:27:50 +0000 UTCHi Erik, The NHK accent dictionary has a great verb section that clearly shows the pitch-accent for the verb conjugations you're looking for. I highly recommend that you buy it, especially for what you're looking for. Incidentally, the pitch-accent for the う form of い all adjectives is 中高, with the downstep occurring on the ろ—the う then attaches low. Cheers!
Dogen
2018-01-02 06:50:40 +0000 UTCHi Grey, In the command form (〜なさい), the pitch accent starts low, goes up, and stays high until the さ, where it drops, regardless of the verb. Thus: iKINASAi taBENASAi haSHIRINASAi etc. For しまう、it appears that the verb retains its normal て pitch accent pattern, and しまう attaches high and stays high to heiban verbs, and attaches low and stays low for downstep verbs. If you can read Japanese fluently then either the Shinmeikai Accent dictionary or the NHK accent dictionary are the best resources for finding out the pitch-accent for the various words and conjugations that exist in Japanese. If you can't read Japanese fluently quite yet, then this site does a pretty good job: <a href="http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/phrasing/index" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/phrasing/index</a> Just type in the Japanese and press 'Analyze' at the bottom of the page and a pitch-accent pattern will be displayed. Keep in mind however, that this website isn't always 100% accurate. Hope this helps!
Dogen
2018-01-02 06:37:24 +0000 UTCHi Gilbert, For the colloquial shorting of している into してる 「い」 is completely dropped. Cheers!
Dogen
2018-01-02 06:36:03 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, for the colloquial shortening of ~ている form of verbs to ~てる i.e. してる, is this a fully dropped い or a devoiced one?
Gilbert Y
2018-01-01 19:06:11 +0000 UTCHey Dogen, I know you've already covered many of common verb conjugations in your previous videos, however you didn't cover all of them (command form, しまう, etc.). What's a good way to find out the pitch accent patter (rules) for those conjugations?
vzwGrey
2017-12-31 17:52:01 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, I was just wondering if there were any useful rules for the pitch accents of -masu stems of verbs. Like if you knew 切る, using that to find 切り, if you knew 減る, using that to find 減り, etc. This may be too complicated a topic for one comment though, I'm not sure. Also, do the Shinmeikai Japanese Accent Dictionary and NHK Accent Dictionary cover these sorts of topics, or are they just big lists of words and their pitch accent numbers? I'm interested in learning more in-depth about pitch accent phenomena (like の affecting the pitch of the preceding word, less common conjugations like 良かろう, the proper pitch accent of all the different particles, etc.) but am not sure where to proceed after your videos short of taking a lecture at 慶應義塾大学.
Erik Alexander Olson
2017-12-30 19:22:46 +0000 UTCGreat question Nicolas. I wouldn't encourage learners to do so, and this is because though it's acceptable to drop い and う as explained in the previous lessons, dropping consonants only occurs in special circumstances, such as in こっから（ここから）, to name one. That said, we'll be exploring these special instances in the future, so stay tuned!
Dogen
2017-12-29 08:30:58 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, Thanks for elaborating on my question from last time! I have a follow-up question as well: is it acceptable to replace many subsequent voiceless consonants with a single っ (little tsu)? For example, when reading "書くこと", I would find it easier to say "かっこと", since quickly repeating "k" three times feels difficult to me even with knowledge of devoicing. Cheers, Nicolas
Nicolas Guillemot
2017-12-29 08:23:53 +0000 UTCHi Jared, I think this may be what's happening. I'll be sure to let Niklas know about your observations! Cheers!
Dogen
2017-12-29 03:08:51 +0000 UTCHi Bertrand, I think this is great advice. I did want to briefly touch on the issue however, as I received a very in depth question on the topic. Incidentally, we'll actually be covering many of the examples you've mentioned in upcoming lessons! Have a great winter break!
Dogen
2017-12-29 03:02:40 +0000 UTCMy guess on "でせ": I think the u in this devoiced and unstressed position sometimes is expressed as something somewhat like a weak schwa [ə] but with the lips more closed like a う. I think this may lead English natives with certain backgrounds to misperceive the tiny squashed う sound as close to an e, perhaps because in English, e often collapses to a weak schwa.
Judas BH
2017-12-29 02:23:53 +0000 UTCOn dropped vowels: I'd advise against dropping vowels in most cases. In my experience, if you start dropping vowels left and right in phrases like "iku ka", you run the risk of changing the meaning of the phrase. "Iku ka" would become "ikka", which is a colloquial way of saying "iika", as in "Ma(a), ikka". A similar thing occurs when, instead of saying "Sou suru ka", someone says "Sou sukka". I'm sure there's a proper linguistic term for this "small tsu-ification" of entire syllables in the name of fluidity. Happy holidays, Dogen! Looking forward to more lessons in 2018.
Toberu
2017-12-28 18:25:31 +0000 UTC
