The reading is written as ごがつ. The vocab has sound gomatsu. At least that is what I hear. It should be gogatsu. Do I hear wrong or is it wrong?
I find that a G in japanese can often sound like NG. It is not the same as a western G, which can sometimes sound closer to a K
2 Likes
I hear ごがつ very clearly. You might want to try using a different speaker device and see if that helps. If that doesn’t maybe it’s just a dialect/way of speaking you’re not used to hearing. I’ve had a lot of practice listening to Japanese and it sounds perfectly normal to me.
1 Like
Thanks. I guess I need to spend some time training my ear to recognize Japanese sounds more clearly. Will look on youtube what are some ways to do that.
2 Likes
Just listening to Japanese, even if you can hardly understand anything, as expected of beginners is still good practice. I’ve done a variety of different things, some including - youtube (find a Japanese youtuber that you like focused on a topic you enjoy), anime, drama, songs, and podcasts. You probably won’t really notice much improvement if any in the short term, but keep on listening to at least a little bit every day if you can and you’ll be amazed at your progress months later.
1 Like
There are other things like this that you can only pick up by listening to Japanese. One thing I’ve found is that whenever ん is followed by a vowel sound (千円(せんえん)、原因(げんいん) etc) the ‘n’ sound doesn’t really come out as a solid consonant . So the former there sounds like “seiyen” and the second like “geiyin”. Which I’m cool with because saying the hard ‘n’ feels really awkward for me personally.
The ‘g’ problem was a trap for me when I first started watching anime. Because I’d hear the hard ‘g’ at the start of ごめん and the soft ‘ng’ when following something else as in ありがとう、I literally thought these words were pronounced “こめん” and “ありんがとう”. But messing this up and learning the correction has helped my pronunciation, weirdly.
1 Like
There are two g sounds in Japanese. This Stack Exchange question gets into the rules of pronunciation.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.