I’m still new to WK. Really enjoying it so far, and I will definitely get the paid version once I finish level 3. However, one thing I’m struggling with is how to remember if a word or kanji has う in it. For example, the kanji 女 doesn’t have u in it (じょ) but the kanji for middle, 中, has it (ちゅう).
Since the pronunciation difference isn’t obvious (at least to me), every time there’s a う present in the word, I try to remember/visualize the mnemonic object or thing wearing a hat (to represent the hat on the う). So Chewbacca in the mnemonic for middle is wearing a hat, but Jo the woman isn’t. Was wondering if there was an easier way to remember this, or do you folks also use similar mnemonics for subtle differences.
That is your problem, right here. In Japanese, it makes a big difference if there is an u or not. Each “mora” should ideally be held for exactly one beat (imagine a metronome). The u adds one more beat to the pronunciation.
I would say the answer to your question is, get used to hearing the difference between long and short vowels, aka listen to a ton of Japanese and get used to the sounds (Comprehensible Japanese).
At least at the lower levels, they’re pretty good about using different mnemonics for different sounds. ちゅ is usually chute, so if you remember Chewbacca it’s always ちゅう. And じょう is a different character named “Joe,” so Jo is always じょ.
Edit: Oops! Chute is actually しゅ. ちゅ doesn’t seem to be a very common kanji reading so I can’t find any examples where it’s used. So maybe that’s helpful?
Yeah, the pronunciation difference is important; but it’s also quite hard for most native English speakers to hear at first, because there are almost no cases of English words where the vowel sound is identical and the distinction is made purely by how long the vowel is held for [*]. So an English native speaker is having to train their brain to pull apart two things it would normally squash together as the same thing; this is always hard, like a Japanese speaker trying to separate L and R.
My suggestions are thus something like:
Be aware that vowel length is important and try to listen for it, and to make the distinction when speaking or sounding out a word in your head
Build up enough listening practice over time that you can persuade your brain that it needs to distinguish
In the meantime, use mnemonics where necessary/helpful to remind yourself which vowels are long and which short
[*] English does have things commonly called “long and short vowels”, but these are really qualitatively different vowel sounds with unhelpful names that derive from them originally being actually long/short before the Great Vowel Shift hundreds of years ago. The Japanese long/short really is purely the length. The one example I do know of of a true length difference is “shed” vs “shared” in the standard southern English accent.
I was just about to say that. There are a couple of shortcuts, but ちゅ, as opposed to ちゅう, is so rare that one may as well call it non-existent. In addition, readings like きょ、しょ、ちょ are rarer than きょう、しょう、ちょう, so you can guess the rarer just off of probability and be right quite often.
As for actual methods, I can only recommend brute memorization. When it comes to learning on-readings, there are a surprisingly limited number of combinations that appear in the real world, with some being more/less common than others. Once you get used to it, differentiating long/short vowel sounds becomes amazingly trivial.
Thanks for the tips. I listen 30 minutes a day but the long and short vowels are still hard for me to distinguish. I’ll plan on doing some extra training for this.
