As a non-English-speaker, I do think being born into English is perhaps THE main problem for learning correct pronunciation.
It is likely a stacked issue. English speaking countries dub movies and media, and that means you don’t naturally get exposed to other languages. Secondly, this might cause you to feel a bit arrogant (sorry) about having English as your native tongue and discard other languages (Do I need to know X in my daily life?)? And your English schools might not require you to learn at least 3 languages? (correct if wrong!)
All of these things, decreaseas the English speaking person’s ability when it comes to pronunciation - learning in general and pronunciation especially.
Subtitles is part of why I’m very happy to live where I am in Sweden, a minority country that think dubbing is too costly, but rather choose to do subtitles. And, in the movies, you can ignore them. Not so for dubbing, elsewhere, when you are forced upon an interpretation without recognizing the translation at all!
Just speaking my mind a bit. Each to their own in culture and that’s what it’s all about - but some ideas are more practical and realistic if you think about it.
Our schools require only English, so much less than 3, yes. Language options are only usually introduced in highschool, and usually it is just a choice between Spanish and French. 4 years of a highschool language in the US is basically nothing though. I theoretically took 2 years of Spanish, but even if I recalled any of it, it would only really be like a semester of college Spanish.
Though I’m not sure how big the dubbing vs subbing difference is, considering I regularly watched subbed Japanese, but that hasn’t really helped me distinguish between a し and an English "shee. " I think a large part with you would be the actual wider range of sounds from multiple languages. Particularly in this case, since you natively get the Japanese し sound.
ʃ to me sounds significantly more wooshier, and is much more loose. I feel like looking at where the sounds are produced helps, since that is also a bit different.
I just realized we do all these different kinds of things in warmups etc., in my choir. I guess singing experience also helps quite a bit, since we’ve had to learn pronunciations for dozens of languages (with varying success ).
To me it feels like men often make it more closer to the English one especially in stuff like “Yosshh!” and other exclamations. I guess this can leak to casual speach as well.
Maybe techincally, but this doesn’t sound that Japanese to me (nor like a native). But that may have to do with the other things in the sound.
EDIT: In my opinion there is in reality more difference than those clips convey. But the clip I guess is not a true representation, just a technically correct one.
In Russian we have soft “sh” (щ) and hard “sh” (ш) and similarly for all consonants (and two vowels).
Japanese し is almost exactly like щ but more frontal. More towards the teeth. I suppose my tip would be to pay attention to where in your mouth the sound seems to resonate.
This is also the key to the Japanese ら sounds. It’s behind the teeth.
At least that is my perception and what helped me with my pronunciation. I’ve been told by a native Japanese language teacher that I sound close to native, to lend it any credibility.
The English language seems to position sounds more towards the center of the mouth, as a general rule. So perhaps just generally try to bring your pronunciation more to the front with your tongue.
Pretty normal for there to be realisational differences amongst speakers, but to me they’re clearly pronouncing it in roughly the same place (Kyoko pronounces it with her tongue a bit closer to her palate I think). Both clearly different to how we’d say it in English though.
Well, I was just using the phonetic pages for ɕ and ʃ, so the speakers could be from various languages, but the overall mouth movement should be the same
I merely wanted to point out how little English speaking people know about the pronunciations of other languages, even as the UK is part of Europe - whether you wanna get out of the EU or not - you cannot change your geological location! (just sayin’).
I guess it depends on how you listen. The Japanese “sh” is easy to hear if you listen to Koichi on things like 歌手. It’s like they way “h” is pronounced in ひと* but with more sibilance.
*Move the middle of your tongue towards the roof of your mouth and exhale. That wooshing sound is the Japanese “h”. Listen to the recordings on 人々
This plus training your ear. For example, if you listen to a wide range of English accents you can start picking out the different sounds through the contrast, although I do think being multilingual is a big part of it too.
They do.
Kenichi pronounces everything with a bias towards the back of the throat, probably due to his use of the nasal が. So his tongue is raised at the back on the “sh” in 歌手.
Kyoko, on the other hand, uses the middle of her tongue for the “sh” sound but the sound moves forward from there, but not quite all the way to the front like the Western “sh”. It’s almost like she says “kash-su”.
).
sorry