Marking as correct when I miss the long う or お

WaniKani
21

heh, my native language doesn’t distinguish between lax and tense vowels though. That might be the main reason for that — I learned English from a kind of midwest-west coast accent (idk, Arizona) mixed with RP and Thai and like some south asian variety. So my pronunciations are all over the place, but I do try to stick to standard AmE.

Incidentally, I don’t actually use /ʃ/ (or its affricate or their voiced counterparts) for the sh, ch sounds — I use the alveolo-palatals (ex. /ɕ/) instead, because they’re closer to what I have in Thai :>
It just so happens that Japanese also uses these more frontal (I think?) consonants instead too, so my Japanese accent sounds less western (ig, lol). Interestingly nobody’s ever said anything about that particular variation — I suspect that’s mostly because English doesn’t distingush between postalveolars and alveolo-palatals.

Funny, I’m trying to learn Polish right now and I can’t distinguish between the retroflex (ex., /ʂ/) and the alveolo-palatals, which is apparently a distinction that it makes :sweat_smile: I just don’t understand retroflex consonants.

Your point about how a long-lax /ʃɪːt/ is a stretched-out “shit” and how a short-tense /ʃit/ is a quick “sheet”… I almost see the opposite way, hah. For me /ʃɪːt/ is just “sheet”, and /ʃit/ is just “shit”. Interesting how that comes about!

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At uni when we learned japanese pronunciation it wasn’t taught in a language gnostic way.
For example, when teaching r/d sound, we were given specific instructions on how to move our lips and position our tongue (e.g. in the case of ‘r’ you must put your tongue on the roof of your mouth) which I can assure you are nothing like my native tongue. I suspect there are many videos and documents on the subject of mouth/throat/tongue positions for each and every pronunciation you need.

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Actually, refreshing a bit on how these things are transcribed, maybe it doesn’t suggest that. Maybe it’s just that UK english has a phonemic distinction between long and short i and US english doesn’t, so a phonemic transcription of UK english needs the length marker but for US english it can be dropped.

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keep in mind it’s a broad transcription, and sometimes lax/tense distinctions are not made in those. so it may well not even be the exact vowel (although then you get into thinking about phones and phonemes and what they really represent, and I’m wholly unqualified to talk about that kind of thing).

incidentally the voiced alveolar tap/flap ɾ that Japanese has is far more common than the english ɹ, which people outside the anglosphere tend to substitute with r, ɾ, l, or even n or d. Learning a new phonology is always going to be difficult, esp. if your native language’s phonology is very dissimilar to it.

(also also gnostic as the opposite of agnostic… amazing. I’ll have to steal that.)

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So many answers so fast. Now I would like to know: @dizzyispower , what did you hope for, and what did you decide to do?

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Quite. It’s like, let OP get a word in edgeways. :stuck_out_tongue:

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My name starts with a Z, yet basically no one uses a Z sound, everyone (including myself) are “lazy” and don’t “tonate” the Z, making it an S sound =P

So Z is basically a “tonated” S, it takes a bit more effort (for us who don’t use Z much)
If that makes any sense :rofl:

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28

This is important, which is why you should not mark mistakes correct unless you’re 100 percent sure it’s a genuine typing error OP.

Personally, I don’t think you can really get “spelling” mistakes in Japanese.

English is a weird amalgamation of many languages (primarily French and middle German with a bit of Latin and Greek and a few others thrown in), and the rules that govern English are horrifically inconsistent.

Swapping the I and E, is a simple spelling mistake. If you write recieve instead of receive, it’s obviously just a typo. But you still know exactly what word it is.

Take for instance the word “lie”. This is what you do when you tell an untruth. If you’re making soap, you use “lye”. Same pronunciation, but different spelling. However this is the same sound that appears in “high”, “fly”, “buy”, “kite”, “eye” and many more, and none of them are spelled the same, even though they all use the exact same vowel sound. This is the sort of thing that causes spelling mistakes. In English, spelling mistakes rarely change the word from one word to another.

They do in Japanese.

Take for instance your long vowel sound.

Yuki ゆき- snow
Yuuki ゆうき- courage.

By "mis"spelling the word, you’ve used a different word entirely. Sometimes you might make a word that isn’t even a real word.

This doesn’t happen in English. If I say “the kite flew hihg”, it’s obviously supposed to be the word “high”.

This is because, as Gwynethil says, English isn’t spelled phonetically, but Japanese is. It’s not simply a matter of misspelling or mispronouncing a word. You’re going to be writing or saying a completely different word, or a non-existent word which will sound like gibberish.

Long vowels are there for a reason. You can’t just not learn them properly. If you write “とう” instead of “と” (or vice versa) because you’re lazy and couldn’t be bothered, or you can’t remember, then you don’t actually know it yet, and that’s going to bite you in the butt eventually.

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29

There are a handful of kana that have identical pronunciations (in standard Japanese at least, and in all modern dialects in some cases). First graders in Japan have to drill these to get their spelling right.

The most common one you’ll see on this forum is probably people using わ instead of the particle は.

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Yeah, Japanese orthography is certainly a lot more phonetic than English is, but it helps to keep in mind that it still has occasional weirdness.

See the bullet points on modern kana usage on the Japanese script reform wikipedia article. An example in WaniKani of the last point, I guess, is that the reading of 年中 is written as ねんじゅう rather than ねんぢゅう, even though the じゅう is a rendaku of ちゅう. But 鼻血 is はなぢ.

As another example where it’s not quite phonetic, compare the pronunciations of

  1. 王 (おう) (forvo)
  2. 大 (おお) (forvo)
  3. 追う (おう) (forvo)

王 sounds a lot closer to 大 than to 追う.

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That’s a little different. 王 (おう) and 大 (おお) would both be phonetically written as オー, while 追う (おう) would be phonetically written as オウ. That’s because the う in 追う is okurigana and has to be considered separately from the お.

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Pro tip: turn on the automatic vocab reading after you get one right. You’ll quickly realize how much of a pitfall you wanna get in.

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@Pizh mentioned not being able to distinguish s and z. As far as I can tell, we don’t know anything about the OP’s native language specifically.

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It’s one of the things that kills me when it comes to romanization, because vowel length is so important. I prefer the approach which adds an extra “o” or “u” or uses the “long o” character with a line above the “o”. Like, it’s really not that hard to romanize properly, yet I see it gone wrong in so many places :(.

@dizzyispower a very bad idea, I think. Vowel length is important, especially those deep/long “o” sounds.

Something to also be aware of is that kana is a bit of a phonetic approximation. When you say 学生, you don’t really pronounce the う in く, nor the い in せい. So if you do make a sound longer, it matters.

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@dizzyispower What you might consider is choosing (or noticing when wanikani has chosen - they’re pretty consistent here) one mnemonic for the long vowels and another for the short ones. This helps me a lot in keeping things distinct from each other, at least.

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38

Hmm, if kana was modernized after world war 2, why is wa still written as ha?

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The particles は, へ, and を all survived the reform with their classical spellings intact. Presumably there was some value seen in maintaining their spelling over the same use of those when not appearing as particles. It does make them stand out, I suppose. Maybe someone knows more about what the thought processes were at the time.

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ちょ is not the same as ちよ. Different pronunciations and meanings. Why learn Japanese if you aren’t going to learn it properly?

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I remember seeing a video, I think by Yuta, where he said that sometimes, even the Japanese forget about whether to use お or う in words like 通す「とおす」. But that’s just with regards to spelling, the pronunciation stays the same whether it’s 「とおす」or 「とうす」. You could get away with that if you want, mark the word correct when you make that kind of mistake, but you can’t do it when you confuse words that contain long vowels. The pronunciation will be different in that case.

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I know, that’s why I said i’m guessing and that it’s a possibility. If they aren’t an L1 Spanish speaker they can ignore it, it’s just that the probability is reasonably high because of the top ~20 widely spoken languages only Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, the dravidian languages, and Korean would have this problem, and given the lack of appreciation for vowel lengths Spanish seems the most likely.