Anyone have any tips on how to remember when a word uses a rendaku and when it doesn’t? If I had a dollar for every time I’ve made a mistake due to a rendaku, I would probably be nearing a thousand bucks
I heard that rendaku exists to help make words easier to speak which I can understand for words with noma like 人々 or 様々. However when you get to non-noma words like 便所 and 寝不足 I struggle with remembering that the rendaku is there since for me personally it’s hard to sense when it is needed. For example, I often would get 寝不足 wrong since neFUsoku to me personally feels easier to say than neBUsoku.
When I do keep rendakus in mind, it can sometimes backfire. A recent example is 極端, which I keep thinking is rendakued because kyokuDAn feels easier to pronounce than kyokuTAn, but in reality it doesn’t need a rendaku
Does anyone have any advice or tips on how to get better with recognizing when a word needs to be rendakued? Or is it something where you just need to rote memorize it?
It’s not failproof, but a way is learning to recognize words regardless of Kanji, i.e. Kana only or audio only.
In a way, half of the equation here is ears / listening. I still have problem recognizing s and z. tho resorting to Romaji-visual is yet another way here – not very Japanesey
Rote memorize, maybe, but it also depends on how you rote memorize.
Reading aloud / speaking does wonders with the tongue memorization, rendaku really is a matter of pattern recognition and reflex.
What helped me the most to get better at it is to review full sentences only and read each sentence aloud in full at each review for each mined word in the sentence. A few thousands of reviews later you get a feel for the common patterns (but still get tripped a lot ! Japanese is unfair for that).
Trying to reading aloud faster as time goes on also helps because the faster you read aloud the more instinctive you start to go and thus you can more easily see which rendaku you know and which are still a conscious effort.
When in doubt go with your guts ! (And fix your gut instinct a billion times )
I wanted to agree with what’s already been said: it’s about developing the right gut instinct for it. Some rendaku are really easy and some are quite difficult. For me it can sometimes help to make up little pet theories about “why” the rendaku is there (or isn’t if it normally is). I’ve been slowly starting to do this same process for pitch accent.
For example, usually the rendaku’d version is easier to say if you try both. A nonzero number of times there might be—and WaniKani might actually have—another word with other kanji that might be a homophone except for the rendaku, etc…
ETA: btw, hilarious that WK has 濁 (level 58) but not 連濁
honestly for me, what causes the most frustration is the cases that don’t have rendaku - because those tend to be the exception.
for example you have 心身 ( しんしん） but you also have 信心 (しんじん)
so if the rendaku happened because of the natural human tendency to adjust phonetics to ease of utterance - then how did しんしん survive? or - why did しんじん happen in the first place?
same with ビー玉 (ビーだま）vs. 金玉 （きんたま）
the latter seems particularly strange to me since ん＋た almost always rendakus from what i’ve seen so far…
regarding 寝不足 for example, our concept of “FU” is very different from the japanese “FU” which is sometimes actually closer to “HU”
so try to say : “neHUsoku” and you’ll see why suddenly trying to weakly whistle in the middle of a word is a bit unnatural. try to search for words that have “something + E + ふ” (e.g. けふ、れふ、てふ、etc. ) and you’ll see they barely exist. it’s different for a longer vowel (e.g. 政府「せいふ」 even when it’s sandwiched, like in : 礼服 「れいふく」 ）
something about the shorter vowel i guess makes it harder to stop abruptly and then switch to a frail whistling “hu”
but i’m no expert, this is just my own rationalization.
Btw,
According to GPT, there used to be けふ or てふ in japanese, but the former turned to きょう and the latter to ちょう
so 今日 used to be pronounced けふ for example. So as you can see, that structure is simply highly unstable and either rendakus or ハ行転呼 which is apparently the name of this other phenomenon…
the difference seems to be whether ふ is the first part of ANOTHER separate word/term (which ends up in rendaku), or if it’s a sound within the same word (which ends up in Hagyoutenko).
I’m definitely not knowledgeable enough to know what is considered ‘unnatural’ in terms of Japanese pronunciation, but, if I’d never read your post, I would’ve taken something like this in stride as it seems like a relatively normal/reasonable pronunciation.
Speaking out the reviews is something I need to do more. I often study during work hours, so a bit hard to do it, but maybe a bit of murmuring would be fine. Thanks for the advice!
)