Don't Forget Pronunciation

That part is about how the Japanese writing system works. It’s not my specialty, and it’s not related to the points I’m trying to make, so I’ll leave that topic aside.

The problem is that my English dialect has no direct comparison. Which is one of my points. In order to learn Japanese pronunciation, I have to learn new sounds.

The absolute best comparison I can do using my Northwest American English, is:

え is like if I say the name of the letter “a” [e͡ɪ] but if I don’t move my mouth after starting to make the sound. Normally, I would raise my jaw slightly in the middle of the word “a.” But to make the Japanese sound, I don’t make that movement.

I understand what you’re saying, and I agree that there’s a lot of variation. But if those people are all native speakers, they will likely use only Japanese vowels, with only Japanese pronunciation rules. The commonly misused English vowel in “desk” [ɛ] does not exist in native Japanese.

In other words, I think Japanese learners should learn to hear and use the Japanese sound vocabulary exclusively when they speak Japanese. Then they can play around with the expression and length of words, without using incorrect vowels/consonants.

Dude me too. It’s super difficult. Sometimes, surprisingly, っ is difficult for me too. Like: まっち vs まち. In writing and in smooth, slow Japanese, it seems like the difference should be obvious, but in many situations it’s not for me.

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This is really interesting to me as a technically “native Japanese speaker” who grew up with a native Japanese speaking parent who is still learning English. Having been around native English speakers learning Japanese before, but without any linguistics education to inform my thinking, it’s been hard to put my finger on the differences/errors in pronunciation that inevitably occur! Especially when I’m the one making them. Having been gently laughed at by, as well as unintentionally confusing Japanese speaking relatives because of my pronunciation, yeah, I definitely agree with all your points :slight_smile:

Also, Professor Kaisse would be proud!!

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From what I’ve read/experienced those sounds aren’t contrastive for most Korean speakers under 50 in the Seoul area, so if you pronounce them the same you’re still easily understood. I did notice a lot of Americans producing it as a dipthong /ei/ sound.

For those of us who don’t speak a North American variety of English it’s even more - around 20 vowel sounds for received pronunciation, similar for Australian English.

I also agree that pronunciation is often neglected, both from my own experience as an ESL teacher (CELTA, Masters Applied Linguistics), and from my experiences living in Korea for three years. You don’t have to sound exactly like a native speaker - but you do need to make an effort. I knew a lot of American and English expats who would complain about how Koreans wouldn’t understand them without speaking with a perfect accent, yet they spoke Korean with a really thick American or English accents and made no attempt to get it right. My accent in Korean is nowhere near native - yet in three years of living there I never had a Korean fail to understand what I was saying. It really is just about listening carefully and practising.

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Desk and え are exactly the same sounds in my accent, New Zealand, and in Japanese. I honestly can’t comprehend what accent you have and what you are listening to, that they are not, can you please elaborate?

I don’t understand why anyone would not be doing this? Obviously you should not be trying to crowbar Japanese words into your own native language’s pronunciation. The absolute best way is to find a Japanese person and keep making the same sound at each other until they say オライ、ぐー次. Once a friend of ours insisted we were saying the ふ of 花粉症 (hay fever) wrong and as far as we could tell, we were all making the same sound as her lol.

I don’t mean to offend, you clearly have a great interest in the subject but seem to be over complicating things to the detriment of your learning. You may be interested to know that the sounds required to be made for my surname don’t even exist in the Japanese ‘sound vocabulary’ but Japanese people can usually get it after a few tries.

Anyway, 頑張って!

The same reason that many Japanese people speak Katakana English? They don’t know how to make the right sounds or they don’t hear the difference. Generally, people don’t intentionally try to speak with a foreigner’s accent

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Lol no, I mean, if you’re trying to sound correct, then why would you not be doing this. Most Japanese people speak Katakana English because they learnt in High School from a Japanese English teacher and don’t know and don’t care.

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And why did that Japanese high school English teacher not use proper pronunciation? It’s not just about not caring. If you didn’t grow up with a particular sound in your language, it’s harder to learn how to distinguish it. People can genuinely be trying, and genuinely think they’re making the right sounds, and still fail to do so because they don’t hear the difference.

It’s part of the reason having a native speaker listen to your pronunciation is so important. Because you basically can’t catch your own mistakes if you haven’t yet learned to differentiate a sound that isn’t in your own language.

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Learning correct pronunciation can also help with listening comprehension! I’ve found that some of my high school students in Japan can’t understand me when I say certain words because they’ve only been exposed to the katakana pronunciation.
A lot of times these are words that I physically cannot pronounce differently, like “are” or “bath.” As you said, they can’t hear the difference between these words and words that would be pronounced similarly in katakana like “all” and “bus.”

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I think the main difference between our thinking is where we set the bar for “good enough” pronunciation. I think we agree that communication is the most important thing in language learning.

But for me personally, intelligible is not enough. I bet Japanese people can say your surname well enough to be recognized after practicing a few times, but I doubt they can sound like a native speaker saying it, even after saying it hundreds of times.

Same goes with ふ. If a foreigner was recorded saying “かふんしょう” (hay fever), and if Japanese native speakers listened to it (without seeing the speaker), they would easily be able to tell the speaker wasn’t native. Depending on the foreigner’s experience with Japanese pronunciation, the listeners might even have trouble identifying the word without context. But because we are foreigners, they give us a break.

I’m aiming for a native level of pronunciation. I probably won’t ever achieve that level, but I think it’s an important goal for the sake of overall Japanese proficiency.

(By the way, I did a little searching, and I found that in many New Zealand accents, “desk” and え are indeed the same. At least according to Bauer et al. So my example in my post isn’t a good one. I made a generalization that only applies to most of the English-speaking world.)

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For an isolated word, it might be possible to achieve native level pronunciation, but achieving native level intonation when speaking full sentences is probably a much higher hurdle in Japanese. That’s the key factor in a “foreign accent” in Japanese. Even subconsciously emphasizing a word the way you would in your native language will stand out as foreign to a native speaker.

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I did hear people say that their elementary Japanese was better understood in Japan than their upper-intermediate Korean was in Korea, so maybe it’s a thing?

The thing that always infuriated me / made me laugh (depends on the kind of week I was having) was this:

all in Korean
elgillie: thank you
cashier: omg, your Korean is perfect, amazing! Thank you!


elgillie: can I get a 20litre garbage collection bag?
cashier: for which district?
elgillie: names my district
cashier: oh we’ve no 20l for (your district)
elgillie: no problem, do you have 10litre bags?
cashier: yes we do
elgillie: ok, then give me two of them
cashier: do you have a loyalty card?
elgillie: yes I do, here you go
cashier: takes out piece of paper and writes down price on the paper and hands it to me, instead of just reading it
elgillie: blinks :neutral_face:

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Yeah, I never had an issue with being understood if I was lazy with ㅔㅐ. I do hear a marked difference between them, but maybe that’s because I didn’t spend much time in Seoul.

The biggest issue was that in gyeongsangnam-do they don’t really pronounce the diphthongs sometimes, so 돼지고기 becomes 대지고기, 의사 becomes 이사 etc. (I’m assuming you read hangeul based on your post). People from gyeonggi and seoul would normally pick up on those pronunciations and either repeat them to clarify, or correct my pronunciation. I don’t have a difficulty with the diphthongs, but I found in gyeongsang that people would correct me in the opposite fashion - so I was screwed either way…lol

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No one has even mentioned the Japanese pitch accent system. You’re not going to sound native without it:

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Hard g or soft g. Which will you be?

I was including pitch accent as part of intonation, when I mentioned intonation, but yeah. Perhaps it’s not included in the official meaning linguistically, I’m not sure.

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I have forgotten that I haven’t learn about intonation anywhere. I have been taught that it exists, but for what words?

It’s very difficult to find good descriptions of pitch accent for basically every word written down… you’re probably best off just trying to find recordings of words and matching it.

I live in Kansai, and was basically told “yeah, we’ve got Kansai pitch accents, but we know other places are different, so it’s not a big deal if you say a word differently from us.” Even if the reason I say it differently is because I simply don’t know the pitch accent.

People fret about it, but honestly, context usually saves the day.

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The pitch accent system applies to all words. Not all words are accented but that is part of what has to be learned when learning a new word. Is there an accent on the word and if so, where. I think I recall reading that most foreign words are accented–including words borrowed from Chinese. So unaccented words are all/mostly native Japanese words (but not all or most of native Japanese words are unaccented?). [Edit2: This could be completely wrong–can anyone confirm?]

Here is a dictionary with pitch accent marking in Japanese:
http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

I just discovered this site, but it’s great! To get familiar with their intonation annotation scheme, you can select “Pitch Contour: Show” in the search criteria:

I couldn’t get the audio to work for me.

THIS. It’s nice if you try to make an effort to pronounce Japanese vowels, consonants, and intonation like native speakers but really this should be the least of your concerns.

Unless your career ambition is to be an NHK broadcaster or something.

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My textbook says pitch accent varies so much from dialect to dialect, that it is the least important part of pronouncing Japanese.