I’ve recently stumbled upon the vocab 月末 (げつまつ) and noticed something peculiar about its readings. According to WaniKani, the reading should be げつまつ. However, when I listened to the example sentences using Google Translate’s voice feature, the readings seemed to differ.
For instance, in the first example sentence, “月末までに、このアパートを出ます”, 月末 was pronounced as がつまつ. But in the second example, “パーティーは月末です”, 月末 was pronounced as つきまつ.
Now, I’m a bit confused. Is this simply a mistake of Google’s voice feature, or could there be instances where the readings differ based on context? It’s puzzling because the hiragana text of Google’s Translation box consistently shows げつまつ.
Has anyone else encountered a similar case? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
I cannot promise you that there are not exceptions (regional?), but I have definitely only ever heard Japanese people say げつまつ, both in person and on TV.
I can also confirm that Google (especially Google Translate) and other computerized voice features sometimes do really weird things, even “speaking” a completely different (and on occasion complete nonsense) at times. I only wish I could think of an example off the top of my head, because they can be pretty hilarious. These things tend to get fixed rather quickly because people will report the issue. Nice catch!
Even a lot of the automatic reading software used by Japanese people, like Bouyomichan used by a lot of streamers to automatically read out their comments, very frequently mess up when choosing what reading to take for certain characters, so you can expect to see this sort of confusion a lot.
方 is maybe my favorite one. It’s basically a coin toss whether it’ll be right in picking ほう or かた and almost every time software tends to pick the wrong one.
To be clear, Google Translate is notoriously unreliable when it comes to Japanese. I definitely wouldn’t rely on it to tell me the readings of vocabulary words.
