How To Remember Extra Vowels, Glottal Stops, Etc

romaji is evil. remember the mnemonics in ひらがな。I repeat romaji is evil.
Writing tokyo as ときょ would be weird in hiragana but easy in romaji. Again, romaji is evil.

3 Likes

Listen more. If you know exactly how a word sounds then writing it in kana should be no problem.

1 Like

Another thing to remember is that Japanese is very rhythmically regular. Each kana (usually) represents one mora, or “beat,” meaning that you will spend approximately the same amount of time pronouncing each kana. So:

  • こと koto has two “beats”; you take as long to say the ko as the to.
  • コート kouto, has three “beats”; you pronounce the kou for about twice as long as the to.

It might help when you’re first learning to really focus on enunciating the elongated vowels. Make sure to prounounce ko-oh-to instead of just koh-to. It’s not exactly accurate pronunciation that way, but it’s at least getting it in your head that the longer sound is there in the word.

Similarly, the sokuon っ is pronounced for a full “beat” itself, which is basically just a hesitation before pronouncing the next sound. Usually, it gets inserted in a compound in place of a normal kana (often つ or ち) when the normal kana would be awkward to pronounce in rapid speech. Make sure to enunciate that full “beat” of hesitation when you’re pronouncing the word.

A slightly confusing thing if you’re trying to count “beats” is that the small glide consonants like ょand ゅ do not form a separate beat, even though they look a bit similar to っ. In other words, きょうと kyouto is still just three “beats”: kyo-u-to.

5 Likes

Well, “Tokyo” is not really romaji - it’s just the westernised version of the city’s name.

2 Likes

Do you do any memory stuff? Looks like an adaption of PAO. :smiley:

1 Like

It is an adaptation of PAO; I don’t do competitive memorisation, but I did read “Moonwalking with Einstein” as recommended by another member who also had trouble with some of WK’s mnemonics (there has since been an overhaul of them).

If you’re into memorisation techniques yourself you may find the following interesting (NB - credit for all the data crunching that led to both the chart and the frequency list goes to fellow user rfindley):

3 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.