The female voice sounds like the reading is presented, おんなのひと.
The male, however, sounds to me very distinctly like おんなのしと.
I’m only level 3, so my opinion of something sounding wrong should be taken with a grain of salt. But I’d have liked a blurb in there for why the way he is saying it if its normal and correct.
Am I crazy?
(edit: irony that it sounds like SHE says HI, and HE says SHI lol)
It’s the result of pronouncing “hi” with the tongue very close to the top of the mouth almost as if pronouncing the letter K. It’s a bit similar to how the Spanish people pronounce it.
As you get more listening practice in, you’ll learn about a ton of more inconsistencies in how Japanese people pronounce things. They have dialects. Personal traits. But, rest assured, during the journey, you’ll likely learn to navigate this. It’s confusing at first though for sure! XD
You can probably hear a similar thing in the audio for 人. ひ isn’t pronounced exactly the same as “hi/hee” in English - it’s just an approximation, and the difference will be more noticeable depending on the speaker (it also seems to depend a lot on the specific word, but I’m not enough of a pronunciation expert to know how it works exactly).
There’s tons of that in every language. Regional accents and personal preferences on pronunciation. I encounter a lot of Japanese material where the speaker likes using SUPER soft G’s that sound like N’s.
In the US we have similar phenomena. Californians have a so-Cal or valley girl accent, Minnesotans have that midwest soccer mom accent, Michiganders have a nasal accent, Alabamans have that southern drawl, and New Yorkers sound like Joe Pesci. They aren’t dialectal differences - just regional differences in how hard, soft or stressed some sounds are.
I noticed this today, but the uniqueness of that pronunciation is what actually made me recall it easier. Level 3 seems easier than 2 & 3 RN, which is a bit weird. I’ve seen this question before, but do you have to pay for your level 3 progress to show up? I thought 1-3 water free…
You mean your level tag on the forum? There’s a lag, but you can force it to update if you log off the forum and log back in.
Like it shows 0% kanji and vocabulary, but when I tried to log off it scared me and said I’d lose all data haha
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