Does Italian have a sound like the Japanese R? → They are pretty similar
Does Italian have the ん followed by vowel sound like in せんえん? → Yes it does
Does Italian have a sound like りょ that so many beginners struggle with? → I actually don’t even see the problem here
As @Belthazar says, Italian is pretty much consonant-vowel-consonant just as Japanese is. In fact, Japanese is pretty much a subset phonetically speaking.
On the other hand, and as it is probably well known, we have an hard time aquiring a decent pronunciation in English.
Anyone know of videos of Italians trying to learn Japanese?
Though maybe I’m expecting too much. The user before said “no problems with pronunciation” but they probably just meant “no problems with phonetics.”
Unless Italians also have some innate advantage with short/long vowel distinction, gemination, pitch accent… The other areas that usually trip beginners up with Japanese pronunciation.
I don’t have any videos. However, I have have some Japanese speaking Italian acquaintances. If you hear them speak Japanese, it would be easy to notice they are Italian.
(Edit!!: I am obviously not assuming ALL Italians are like this !)
I actually can’t think of videos of Italians learning Japanese, but maybe you can get an idea here:
He is a well known Italian living in Japan (for over 20 years I believe…). Despite being fluent (well, he works in Japanese TV) I believe that he never really put any effort on working on his accent (plus, speaking Italian he has a strong southern Italian accent) and I would say that any other Italian learning Japanese beginner sounds pretty much like him. Definitely not like a native, but somewhat decent I believe. An Italian learning English beginner is just so much worse.
Obviously I’m biased by knowing that he’s a native Italian speaker ahead of time, but I can easily hear his Italian accent a handful of times in the video.
Yes, definitely, the point is that he is kinda a worst case scenario.
I am definitely far from fluency myself when it comes to Japanese, but provided that I do not entirely mess up with grammar, I am rarely misunderstood by my native Japanese teacher pronunciation-wise. I am almost two years in, but it was also the case at the beginning. Of course it doesn’t mean I sound like a native.
Probably we should put it this way: an italian can read fairly well romaji starting from day 1. It wouldn’t be the case for an english speaker (assuming no other linguistic knowledge).
yeah I forgot to note the fact that in Italy dialect accents are very strong especially in “not so young people like the dude in the video” in the south, he has a very strong southern accent
yes in fact I should have noted that it really depends on the zone where you are from in italy… if you are raised with a regional accent you will never get away with it. I was raised in the north and I have never heard any dialect in my life
Something funny I noticed the other day is, I had a lot of trouble saying マインクラフト without bringing in some English sounds… I ended up saying something weirdly halfway like [ma.iŋ̩k(ɯ)ɾæɸɯ̥t(ɯ?!)]. It’s hard to ignore the pronunciation I know for “Minecraft” and say the proper kana sounds ><
What’s the little º diacritic on the ɯ mean (ɯ̥)? A quick search tells me that it’s ‘voiceless’, but so… what, is it like the way です gets pronounced? With the final [ɯ] sound practically vanishing? (I know that something that is ‘unvoiced’ is pronounced without the vocal cords vibrating, but I’m used to seeing that on consonants, not vowels.)
I guess part of the issue that even though American English is (from what I know) the reference for the English taught in Japanese schools, the American way of pronouncing things doesn’t really line up that well with how Japanese transcribes loan words. I think British pronunciation is often closer. (e.g. Just look at コンピューター. No ‘R’ at the end there.)
What I personally do is to look at the word and ask myself how a Japanese person who pronounce it (or attempt to do so). Then again, I’m from an Asian country with its own variety of English (which co-exists with the standard English we learn in school), so I’m quite used to the sort of ‘default’ (and sometimes incorrect) way some people in Asia process words they don’t know. In any case, I think I’ve yet to see a loanword in Japanese substitute an え (which I’d say is closer to [æ] than あ) for any lone letter A… It does happen for stuff like ‘main’ (メイン) though.
In the standard and many other dialects of Japanese, the vowels ‘i’ and ‘u’ are often devoiced between two voiceless consonants or following a voiceless consonant at the end of a word. This means that the mouth still takes and hold the shape of the vowel for the duration of the mora, it isn’t voiced. The vowel may sound “whispered”, or even deleted to foreigner speakers.
Unless you’re from Philadelphia, in which case it’s “wooder”.
I’m 42 and hoping I can get away with it too. I really like Kenichi’s audio.
Yeah for that one you move the tongue until it’s almost touching the roof of your mouth before pronouncing the いん part.
I’ve found that a lot of the sounds are fairly easy to do as a native Polynesian speaker. If you can rattle off humuhumunukunukuapua’a you’re 80% of the way there.
I would also say that as an Italian native without a heavy dialect/accent, my only ‘big’ issue is pitch (I plan to eventually fully explore Dogen’s series) and sometimes ‘fu’ sounds, although I consider the latter more of a matter of me forgetting to pronounce them right. Gemination and a lot of the components that seem tricky to native English speakers are all part of our phonology ( Italian phonology - Wikipedia), and I was in fact really surprised by how similar the two languages are in many aspects. My grammar textbook is in English and so is my study buddy, so I could easily see the difference (we even dedicated extra lessons to pronunciation exercises after seeing that she was struggling. This is what we used, in case anyone’s interested: https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/materials-for-wasabi-japanese-pronunciation-lessons/#P-table). I, on the other hand (and rather predictably) still struggle to this day with English pronunciation and I can’t get completely rid of my Italian accent (exacerbated by the fact that I’m awfully shy when it comes to actually speaking foreign languages, so I miss out on many opportunities to exercise… Something I’ve been working on, lol.)
Okay, so I guess the idea is if you give an English speaker who knows nothing about Japanese and an Italian speaker who knows nothing about Japanese a text in romaji, you would expect the Italian speaker’s best effort to sound better than the English speaker’s.
Neither actually sounding like a Japanese speaker of course.
Just kidding, it’s just English. Maybe it’s just me, but when I come across a word that could be romaji-fied, my brain immediately swaps to the Japanese pronunciation and whatever sentence I was reading comes to a screeching halt.
Yeah, at the end of the day, neither would. There are still some slightly different sounds. And most importantly, there are no pitch accents markers in your average written text, and pitch accent is such an important and underestimated part of the language – made even harder to grasp since Japanese is spoken so fast and that’s how you get exposed to it. I really wish there was a browser extension or site that automatically added pitch markers to any text you’re reading. It would be quite useful as an initial crutch, similar to furigana.
!)
