Newbie here… with, of course, a few questions to ask
Just one for now, don’t want to drop a huge post
I’ve noticed there are significant differences between the two voices, ‘Kyoko’ and ‘Kenichi’:
With し and ち Kyoko seems to drop the “h” from them and Kenichi sounds more ‘okay’ to me for these; as in, closer to how I’d pronounce them (but I am just a beginner and it’s likely I have wrong pronounciation) or at least easier to pronunce. Edit: she doesn’t really drop it, but it’s less ‘obvious’ than it is in his speech, and the mora sound very different beween them.
With つ Kenichi seems to drop the “u” at the end, Kyoko does not and sounds ‘better’ - I do know about the muting of ‘u’ and ‘i’ if between unvoiced consonants but here we have isolated words?
With ～月 Kenichi adds a “n” (not ん) between the numeral and the month, Kyoko does not and she sounds more natural to me.
五月: Kyoko’s is “go-ga-tsu” Kenichi’s is “go(n)-ga-ts” (with muted “u” at the end)
It’s still early days for me and other differences may become apparent later.
Or maybe it’s just me and my hearing is going the way of the dodo
Now, I doubt either of them is ‘wrong’ otherwise WK would not have used them (riiight?).
But then… what makes for this difference?
I heard about different speech patterns between men and women but haven’t found anything similar in regards to pronounciation.
Is this a male vs female thing?
And if there is no known difference based on gender (which would imply men have to use Kenichi and ladies have to use Kyoko)… which voice do WK users recommend and why?
Kenichi speaks with a nasal G, which is the kind of pronunciation you would hear in NHK news broadcasts, but might be getting less common over time, and it’s also regional (Tokyo) to begin with.
Thanks for the very quick reply!
That’s useful info, much appreciated.
Yeah I figured they were native
Neither sounds ‘foreign’ although it’s probably difficult to tell with isolated words.
But since they’re both labeled as ‘Tokyo accent’ I’d have expected them to sound the same. In Romania we don’t really have differences in pronounciation for people from the same region (unless someone gets an accent/pitch wrong but then it’s a mistake), so it’s a bit weird.
Guess I’m just looking to understand if it’s male-vs-female or not…
(not just the point you’ve now clarified, but the overall differences between them)
If strict adherence to Standard Japanese (the NHK newscaster pronunciation I was mentioning) isn’t important to you, then whichever voice you prefer is probably fine.
Weeell… this brings another question then, sorry
Do we put all these differences on the strict adherence to ‘Standard Japanese’ on Kenichi’s part and ocasional straying from it on Kyoko’s part?
Because if things aren’t this clear-cut (for example he has the ‘nasal G’ but also she is following Standard Japanese for shi and chi while he does not) then it all becomes murky…
I do apologise if this is all a bit silly, I am approaching Japanese following the Tofugu guide: kana and kanji before grammar, sentences, content study - I’m not at this point following NHK or other broadcasts to figure out what the ‘offcial’ pronounciation patterns are.
To be honest, I’m not really aware of what you’re referring to by the differences in the other kana, which is why I haven’t touched on it. Devoicing vowels happens normally in Japanese in a variety of situations, so I don’t think there’s any reason to say that one way or the other is something related to Standard Japanese or not.
Like, です typically is spoken with a devoiced “u” sound at the end, so it sounds something more like “dess” to us, but you will hear people say “desu” with a clear “u” as well, again, likely due to the circumstances of how things play out in an individual sentence and how that person tends to speak, etc.
I would recommend consulting a pronunciation-specific resource if these kinds of small things are important. I know the Youtuber Dogen does a lot on pronunciation, though he is mostly focused on pitch accent. Still, I believe he does touch on allophones at times.
です I happen to know
Before my first JP101 lesson (I did a few but stopped because I didn’t know the kanji and then I came here) I saw it written in romaji ‘desu’ and didn’t know about devoicing so in my head it was always ‘desu’. I was wondering why I never hear ‘desu’ or ‘masu’ in films Now I always think of these as ‘des’ and ‘mas’ and I’ll likely be surprised when I’ll hear ‘desu’ because of context
Coming back to Kenichi and Keiko… they pronounce the same words differently.
The example I gave for 五月 has the nasal G (which I understand now), but also the ‘tsu’ at the end is different: I can clearly hear t-s-u from her but only t-s from him. It seems he is devoicing it even though there is no followup word and he does this with all words ending in つ that I’ve encountered so far (granted, they’re not many yet) - if that’s okay I don’t have a problem with it, but I wouldn’t want to make a bad habit out of it if’s only an individual particularity.
They also pronounce other words slightly differently when it comes to the other two mora I mentioned:
し examples: 大した and 正しい
ち examples: 一月 and 小さい
If the way he voices these two mora in words is according to ‘Standard Japanese’ I actually prefer his pronounciation because it’s easier for me, but what if her voicing the ‘official’ one…
Anyways, I don’t want to drag this on further than it needs to go here.
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
I’m not noticing any significant difference in the way those words are pronounced. Kyoko’s recordings sound perhaps a little less sharp, though that’s a microphone thing rather than a pronunciation thing.
Interesting!
Basically, I hear a stronger h in s-h-i and c-h-i from Kenichi, but it’s subdued from Kyoko almost semi-silent. This makes his ‘sh’ and ‘ch’… fuller, for lack of a better word.
Perhaps it’s just my hearing and I’ve a problem with that particular sound frequency from Kyoko?
This could also account for my not hearing properly the ‘u’ at the end of ‘tsu’ from Kenichi although that’s a different sound frequency.
Thanks for checking
Edit:
Our native language may also play a part in how we hear the mora.
Kenchi’s し sounds exactly like the Romanian word like “şi” (in which “ş” is a consonant English or French or others do not have) while Kyoko’s し sounds closer to the Romanian ‘si’ in a word like ‘sirop’. Hard to explain in writing but the difference between “şi” and “si” is considerable.
Somewhat similar with the sound for “ts” from “tsu” for which we have the consonant “ţ” and the Japanese fully-voiced つ sounds exactly like “ţu” in Romanian, while if u is devoiced it sounds like “ţî” (“î” is a vowel in Romanian).
It could very well be that I am more sensitive to the difference between their voicing because of how I percieve these sounds in Romanian speech.
Misusing these in Romanian speech would be a big problem, and this sparked my interest in the whole voice thing.
I also noticed these differences in pronunciation in し, ち, and was also wondering whether it’s due to gendered or individual differences. Kyoko’s often sound more like si, and ti, rather than shi and chi to me as well.
I suspect that in Japanese these sounds started out as si and ti, but due to many people pronouncing them differently because it’s easier on the tongue, this different pronunciation kind of (also) became the norm, or maybe they always coexisted. I’ve seen similar phenomenon in other languages.
I don’t know how accurate this reconstruction of Old Japanese is: https://youtu.be/xW1IAeNzCj4.
But according to it these sounds were then pronounced as si, ti, tu, …
Yeah, but to be clear, the video is talking about the language from over a thousand years ago, about the same period when Old English was still Anglo-Saxon. The shift is not a recent development.
That’s true. However, according to what’s mentioned in this wikipedia article: Affricate - Wikipedia the ち, つ sound shifts happened as late as in the 16th century. The other sound shifts might also have occurred later than old Japanese.
Oh one other word they pronounce differently is 刀 - but with it the voicing of the mora is the same, it’s just that Kenichi is clearly more excited about the subject, perhaps understandably so
Anyways, I did want to ask about something else:
How worried should I be that the readings of various kanji and vocab words don’t come easily to me, both at Apprentice (mostly) and Guru (less so) levels?
As in: while with some review items my answer is near instant, with others I need a few seconds, with some even much longer probably going well over 10sec. I think maybe I also (involuntarily) cheat a bit by utilizing elimination: “Okay it’s not X nor Y, so that leaves Z which I also learned - now how the hell does Z read?”
Even more weird is that I may be quick with the same item three times in a row but then at the fourth review I’m stuck for a long time.
The meaning of kanji, standalone or in vocab, is usually not a problem.
I do come up with the correct answers eventually, so I move on but if this is a bad sign maybe I should instead fail them on purpose so that they come up for review again and again until I recall them very quickly?
And if the latter, what does this mean in the long term?
I’m still early on, just started level 4. I imagine things will only become more and more complex, plus the whole baggage of kanji+vocab will grow considerably (more things to recognize and recall).
For context:
WaniKani is my first SRS of any kind and currently pretty much my only contact with Japanese (well plus KameSame for production of WK Guru items).
While studying hiragana and katakana I picked up some 60-70 words (most of which I think may have forgotten already due to not using them), then I did a few lessons from JP101 but stopped (they use kanji without furigana) and then I came here.
I think I’ll start grammar once I reach WK level 6 or so, but until then I don’t get to see kanji or vocab outside of WK and KameSame reviews.
I tried a bit of reading on NHK Web Easy but it’s frustrating at this stage. I may recognize some words in film dialogue but I don’t watch Japanese films daily because I don’t have that many
Eventually you get more used to just Japanese stuff, like readings, and then it will be a bit more fluid. And your “elimination” method won’t work past a certain point. So tl;dr, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Ah okay, thank you!
So it’s somewhat normal, or at least not too uncommon, to have such “delays in processing” in the beginning… just roll with them for now as long as I can actually recall the correct reading.
I suppose it relates to another problem I seem to have:
When trying to read the example sentences, I go through a few kana (4-5-6, fewer if there’s also a kanji in the sequence) “voicing” them in my head and then it’s like “brain full, must stop and reset before I can read the next few”.
Very annoying
Funny… I watched a film last evening - Like Father, Like Son from Kore-eda Hirokazu, it was very good! - and I heard ‘desu’ (with a voiced ‘u’) from two characters on a couple of occasions, while others used ‘dess’.
I saw a few mentions in (older) threads about a ‘summary of this review session’ page that apparently would be displayed at the end of a review run showing statistics from the review session.
However I’ve never been given any summary, I only see the stats at the top-left while reviewing each item.
Is this ‘summary’ page a feature that was removed, or is it provided by a userscript, or maybe it’s an active feature but one of my installed userscripts broke the functionality?
