I’ve put together a chart of all the sounds that are used in standard Japanese according the Wikipedia article for Japanese phonology and I thought I’d share it here in case it’s useful to anyone or if anyone can spot any mistakes/oversights in it. It’s tricky to incorporate all the nuances at firs…

[image] Rowena: For it to be bilabial, you would have to be closing your lips Isn’t that what a plosive is? [image] Rowena: That’s the meaning of ‘approximant’ I mean pretty close to being bilabial, not pretty close as in an approximate.

My mistake! I’ve only recently delved into phonetics, so you’ll have to forgive me

Approximant, not approximate. There are bilabial plosives, but there are other bilabials like the nasal ‘m’.

I noticed that you didn’t include を in your list.

Phonetics was one of my most challenging linguistics classes, especially all of the non-English vowels (I’m looking at you, Swedish) and it took me an age to get my head (and mouth!) around it all. Ironically, it was learning about phonetics through French that got me interested in linguistics in t…

[image] Rowena: Approximant, not approximate. That’s funny, I’d always assumed it was approximate since “approximant” sounds like a spelling mistake.

Awesome! A month ago I tried pronouncing a Polish friend’s name, and decided that IPA would be useful, but I found myself super interested in it! I have worked on some natural language processing projects at uni though, so I guess that’s kinda related. I take it you study/studied linguistics at un…

[image] hughesgeorgem: I take it you study/studied linguistics at uni then? Last century, yes.:sweat_smile: I dabbled in Polish with Duolingo for a few months, and the spelling-to-pronunciation is so different to English that studying through IPA would be easier!

Japanese Phonology Chart (with IPA)

Japanese Language Speaking

hughesgeorgem January 4, 2021, 9:14pm 12

This was partly deliberate, since phonetically it’s the same as /o/, but on further thought, I guess it was inconsistent of me to omit it. I’ll add it now…

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Japanese Phonology Chart (with IPA)

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