38 docs tagged with "pronunciation"

A 30-day Japanese pronunciation plan: 10–15 minutes a day on vowels, mora, geminate, pitch, and sentences, with start and end recordings to hear your gains.

Atamadaka pitch accent, sorted: the HLLL contour, accent 1, why short native nouns skew atamadaka, the particle stays low, and いのち, 雨, にほん worked.

Difficult Japanese sounds by native language, sorted: English, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese L1 pitfalls, what transfers, what to drill first.

Japanese geminate consonants in plain phonology: the /Q/ mora, which consonants can double, audible vs silent holds (kk, tt, pp, ss), and the L1 error fix.

Heiban pitch accent, sorted: the LHHH contour, accent 0, why the H sustains onto the following particle, and worked examples for さくら, がっこう, and ともだち.

How to pronounce つ (tsu) in Japanese: the voiceless alveolar affricate [ts], why English drops the t in tsunami, and the three common learner substitutions.

How to pronounce ふ (fu) in Japanese: the voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ], the lips-only articulation, the candle-blow drill, and the English-F fix.

How to read OJAD, sorted: the four features (Accent Dictionary, Verb Handbook, Text Search, Suzuki-kun), the overline notation, and a Jisho-to-OJAD workflow.

Japanese compound-word pitch accent, sorted: the short vs. long N2 rule, kango vs. wago behavior, the –家, –人, –国 patterns, and why dictionaries diverge.

Japanese filler words explained: the あの, えーと, まあ, なんか inventory, the long-vowel hesitation contour, and which fillers survive a workplace register.

Japanese focus prosody, sorted: on-focus pitch widening, post-focal compression, contrastive は vs. thematic は, and why Japanese sounds flat in English ears.

Japanese pitch accent in plain prose: not tone, not stress, just high/low per mora with one drop per word, the four Tokyo patterns, and what to learn next.

Japanese pitch-accent minimal pairs drilled: はし, 雨/飴, 神/紙/髪, 牡蠣/柿, 今/居間, 雲/蜘蛛, each with accent number, contour, particle test, and a one-line drill tip.

Japanese pitch-accent notation, sorted: what 0, 1, 2, 3 mean, how overline-and-drop diagrams work, and how NHK, Shin-meikai, and OJAD differ.

Japanese pronunciation drills, sorted: a 5-minute daily protocol with minimal pairs, mora taps, short-passage shadowing, and a record-and-compare loop.

Japanese questions without か: when casual speech drops か with a final-mora rise, when to use の or のか, and why です・ます always keeps か.

Japanese sentence intonation: the declarative fall, the か rise vs. fall, the rise without か, and the ね, よ, よね, contrastive は tunes.

Japanese speech rate, sorted: ~7-8 morae/sec casual, ~5-6 NHK news, why mora-timing makes it feel fast, and a shadowing protocol to close the gap.

Japanese vowel devoicing: why the i and u in です, ます, and した go silent between voiceless consonants, and why Kansai speakers keep them voiced.

Japanese long vs short vowels, sorted: why おばさん and おばあさん mean different things, how to count morae for length, and why English ears miss it.

Minimal-pair production drills in Japanese: curated sets for vowel length, geminate, and pitch, plus a say-record-compare loop to fix what your mouth collapses.

Mora vs syllable in Japanese, sorted: the kana-equals-beat rule, the four mora types, why 東京 is 4 morae but 2 syllables, and how to count any word.

Mora-timing drills that retrain English stress-timing into even Japanese beats: tap-each-mora, metronome counts, and graded read-aloud passages to practice.

Nakadaka pitch accent, sorted: the LHH...HL...L contour, accent 2 to N−1, how to read the drop from OJAD, and おかし and ともだち worked.

Odaka pitch accent, sorted: the LHH...H + low-particle contour, accent N, why citation form collides with heiban, the が-test, and はし and おとこ worked.

Japanese pitch accent for verbs and adjectives, sorted: the accented vs unaccented binary, the penultimate-mora rule across nine forms, and worked verbs.

Japanese pronunciation priorities, ranked: vowel and consonant accuracy first, then mora-timing and intonation, with an honest take on where pitch accent fits.

Record and compare your Japanese pronunciation to close the gap your own ear hides: the record-listen-compare loop, own-voice blindspot, and honest feedback.

Japanese regional pitch accent, sorted: why the four patterns are Tokyo-only, how Keihan (Kansai) adds an initial-pitch axis, and what accentless dialects do.

Rendaku in Japanese, sorted: the k to g, s to z, t to d, h to b voicing shifts, Lyman's Law (yamakaze not yamagaze), and the wago vs kango split.

Sentence-level prosody practice for Japanese: drill whole-sentence pitch contours (statement falls, question rises, focus) with shadowing and recording.

Should you learn Japanese pitch accent? An honest cost-benefit: the perfectionism trap, the textbook trap, and the level-keyed split J-Compass recommends.

Japanese stress vs pitch accent, sorted: why Japanese has no stress, the four cues English bundles, schwa reduction, and the flatten-first habit for learners.

Japanese consonant inventory in IPA: the ~15 core phonemes, how they map to the kana chart, and the allophony behind し, ち, つ, ふ, and ひ, with full IPA tables.

Japanese vowel inventory in IPA: the five vowels /a i ɯ e o/, why う is compressed not rounded, and phonemic length pairs like おじさん vs おじいさん, drilled.

Japanese ら-row pronunciation, sorted: the alveolar tap [ɾ] behind ら り る れ ろ, why it is neither English R nor L, articulation steps, and L1 fixes.

Japanese moraic nasal ん in plain phonology: the five allophones (m, n, ŋ, ɲ, nasalized vowel / ɴ), why romaji hides them, and the L1-English error fix.

Why Tokyo is four morae in Japanese but two syllables in English, worked through karaoke, Pokemon, judo, plus a three-drill protocol to retrain your timing.