DARN the “ U “ sound !!! Most of my mistakes in WANI KANI now that I am at LEVEL 10 seem to be due to deciding if the hiragana spelling needs the “U “ sound or not !!!
ITs driving me crazy !!! I guess that why many people say reading / writing sentences in hiragana is troublesome / bothersome.
ANyone else have this issue ?
I wish there was a script to not mark your answer wrong if it is only due to the MISSING or ADDITION of the “U” sound.
The… u sound? What sort of words are we talking about where u-sounds are even in debate?
Are we talking about the long-O, spelt ～おう? WaniKani’s mnemonics make a point of distinguishing between the long and short o sounds, so just make sure you concentrate on which is which.
No, people say reading sentences in hiragana is troublesome because the lack of kanji makes it near-impossible to distinguish between homophones. You’ll reach that point yourself eventually.
And also it’s hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins, though a lot of literature intended for young children gets around this by using spaces.
If you haven’t read about it before I recommend some basic reading about Japanese pronouciation especially the long vowels part and about Pitch Accent and the difference between a Syllable and a Mora.
Understanding the rhythm of the Japanese language and how the count for ゆ vs ゆう is different or かた vs かった can make it more significant because it is.
I’m not suggesting mastering this, just having the general knowledge might help you separate the way you think about english abc and aeiou and sometimes y versus Japanese あぁうぅえぇおぉやゃゆゅ and っ/ー and their role when spelling using hiragana and their counter parts in katakana.
This is definitely not a case for an undo button but for further understanding of the language itself. And I’m a an undo button user, but not for this kind of mistakes. nope.
In English you can elongate words for emphasis. Like if you say you realllllly like something. Japanese pronounces each mora the same speed, but additional mora are going to inherently take more time.
So しゅう is longer to say than しゅ
If you scroll up to 2tea’s links on pronunciation and mora they have sound examples since it’s difficult to explain over text.
Yes, it really does (consider how you’d feel about a Japanese speaker asking whether “l” and “r” really sound that different – they may sound the same to them but they certainly don’t to us!). The “long vs short vowel” distinction is one of the harder things for native English speakers to get to grips with, because in our own language we don’t generally[*] distinguish based on vowel length, but instead on the vowel “quality” (i.e. what it sounds like, “red” vs “reed” and so on). But it’s exactly because it’s hard for us to tell apart a こ from a こう that we need to practice listening for the difference when we hear the word, making it when we say the word, and remembering which words are which (and how they’re written). If you let the short and long vowels just collapse together in your brain you’re going to have a much worse time later trying to separate them again – you’d need to relearn a ton of words.
[*] I only know of one English word pair distinguished by vowel length alone in my (standard southern British) accent: “shed” and “shared”.
Not exactly う issue (still mora issue), but I had Japanese natives completly lost because I screwed up the classic びよういん (hair salon) vs びょういん (hospital). They sound basically the same to me except when I focus hard.
And of course there’s the notorious ‘read’ that changes its pronunciation according to its tense.
At first when I read about people complaining they can’t hear the difference between
ここ and 高校 or and 橋 I was a bit perplexed, but then I read about how the infant brain is trained to hear the sounds of the languages its exposed to and can’t recognize sounds it’s not familiar with because they don’t exist (it’s a gross simplification, but I don’t remember where I’ve read it to reference it.)
I’m lucky that there are overlaps between my mother tongue and Japanese when it comes to pronunciation where words sound identical but have different meanings and there’s also a concept that is very similar to pitch accent that changes the meaning of identical spelled words. It explains why I’ve never had this difficulty with listening when it comes to Japanese. Chinese and Thai is a whole different ball game though, and I doubt I will ever be able to distinguish between ma, ma, ma and ma or pronounce it myself… it’s a lost cause…
When I learned German, I ignored vowel length and u/ü for many years because it didn’t seem that important and I had to learn fast. Later I realised it was VERY important, and it took a long time to relearn a bunch of words properly after years of bad habits.
Due to that, the best thing I did for my Japanese was to decide to care about vowel length and pitch from the very start and it’s amazing what that does to your brain. So every word I hear, part of my brain is paying attention and I learn vowel length pretty effortlessly, and pitch to a degree that is good enough (or so I’m told). Getting my pitch accent as good as my spelling would take more deliberate effort, but I just thought I’d throw that out there - just caring does a lot for memory and doesn’t cost any time.
Other reasons to care I’m not sure have been mentioned:
Later when you want to type with Japanese IME (also useful for looking up kanji in new words)
When you read text that’s just in hiragana or katakanised for some stylistic reason
If you ever want to understand spoken Japanese. There are so many homophones, it will narrow down what something can mean by a massive amount.
one of my relatives told me that, too! She studied linguistics and said it’s a bit like if your brain creates buckets for sounds, and if you don’t have a bucket for a new sound, then when you first hear it, it will go into the nearest bucket and you have to get a lot of practice with immediate feedback to build new buckets, hence the massive l/r challenge faced by Japanese people.
As an example with う, I completely stumped my girlfriend with 候補者 because I pronounced it こうほうしゃ. Like in context it was clearly the only option that made sense, but it gave her the YouTube buffering pop-up on her face for a few seconds. Also pitch. I don’t remember what I used but it probably wasn’t right.
On the topic, pitch and vowel length can completely change the feel of the word. Japanese learners are more or less doomed to make a ton of pitch accent mistakes/lack knowledge of correct pitch, but vowel length is something we more or less all learn naturally by learning readings so it’s worth it to put that knowledge to work and get used to listening for and saying them right.
Unless it’s not the north American pronunciation and then ドア and バーター are very close to the original British one. I don’t think they have a way to pronounce my username though…
and 橋 I was a bit perplexed, but then I read about how the infant brain is trained to hear the sounds of the languages its exposed to and can’t recognize sounds it’s not familiar with because they don’t exist (it’s a gross simplification, but I don’t remember where I’ve read it to reference it.)