mccEveryone is like "Japanese pronunciation is so easy to learn, there are very few vowels" but what I didn't realize at first is because there are so few vowel sounds in Japanese it is COMPLETELY CRITICAL you pronounce each one exactly or you will not be understood. In English there are many vowel sounds and that means simply picking a "near" vowel when pronouncing a word is clearly comprehensible (or, in some regional accents, expected)
When I mentioned this to Christine she said "yeah, a thing about English is you can just replace any vowel with a schwa" so I tried it, I spoke a sentence in which I pronounced every vowel as a schwa, and to my total shock I just found myself speaking in my normal Oklahoma Voice, the one I'm always subconsciously suppressing. Is that all a "southern accent" actually is?! Indifference to the identity of vowels??!
Ellie@mcc I think you can rotate all the vowels over one and generate a new* accent.
* it's probably already in common use
bob
Rivimea, god of accidents
mym
Gomijacogeo
The Vowel Space
Ray “Tracing” Chen@mcc as someone suppressing a Long Island accent, changing every vowel to /ə/ made it feel like it slipped out more. I guess it’s about what “unstressed” naturally sounds like to yə
margot
~@mcc completely uninformed and unconsidered opinion: wouldn’t surprise me if it’s that and a few other pronunciation tweaks to make the different schwas slightly distinguishable.
external quantum efficiency@mcc now you've got me trying to wedge two schwas into "games" and I don't like it
Dag Ågren ↙︎↙︎↙︎
Athena L.M.@mcc English spelling reform where we only write the consonants
(Nglsh spllng rfrm whr w nl wrt th cnsnnts.)
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe
Rob Isaac@mcc This is famously true in NZ English, which only has one vowel sound (a flattened “uh”), mocked mercilessly internationally as “fush n chups”.
Henri@mcc cot caught
@mcc So my theory is that English has one single vowel, schwa, but it can be pronounced differently depending on context, and that is what accents are in English. Just different opinions on which schwas to jazz up.
наб@mcc strong opinions weakly held, &c., &c.
poswald@mcc If you're not sure how to pronounce a Japanese word, pretend it's an Italian dish and give it a shot. The vowels are all roughly the same as Italian (although you will definitely get the stresses wrong with this technique!)
@poswald that's an interesting idea! It's actually been the case that I've defeated the hardest Japanese pronunciation problem for westerners (pronouncing the l/r) by realizing it's the same as the r in Spanish (or at least, the Spanish r as pronounced in my mouth becomes JA l/r)
James Widman@mcc also, the two languages have completely contradictory concepts about what constitutes a syllable (and how syllables are separated):
- in english, the next syllable begins more or less when a vowel sound changes, but we can sustain a single syllable as long as we want;
- in japanese, the next syllable begins more or less when a constant span of time has passed.
so e.g. in english, "tokyo" is 3 syllables ("to-kee-oh") , but in japanese it's four: "to-o-kyo-o", with no stops.
@mcc also, small tsu (ッ) is a rest note.
@mcc this partially explains why english speakers are constantly mispronouncing japanese names with a repeated vowel sound: they add a glottal stop between the two identical vowels, whereas native speakers just hold the sound for two beats.
@mcc (side note: without being aware of this, engilsh speakers get haiku wrong: A haiku in english sounds better to native-japanese speakers when each syllable is given the same amount of time as every other syllable.)
@mcc there might be a little "sloppiness" about constant rhythm in casual speech...?
But in the Japanese equivalent of "Received Pronunciation", it sounds like the rhythm is very very constant.
Carl Muckenhoupt@JamesWidman @mcc I've seen it suggested that to more closely match Japanese haiku, English-language haiku should have fewer syllables, like 3/5/3 instead of 5/7/5
pandabutter [I have moved]@JamesWidman @mcc I wrote a haiku once! When I turn on my "anglophone ears", all the lines sound about the same length... but if I write it out it Japanese, it's 5/7/5 kana per line. 1 kana = 1 syllable is a pretty safe way to think about it.
It's why learning kana was so critical to learning the language, for me at least. I started to think about Japanese with its own internal logic, approach it on its own terms.
@JamesWidman that is an interesting observation
Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏@mcc I recall some fellow talking about learning Vietnamese and saying there were just two inflections between a warm greeting and calling someone's mother a cow.
Shar(yna)Tran/Shark(aeopteryx)@alan This is (in a broad sense) true, but we use tones and diacriticals to denote this. Not the same situation.
@Sharksonaplane Thanks. I knew it was wrong in some way, but in my defence it was my recollection of a TV clip from roughly four decades ago... [insert crusty old fart noises here]
@mcc I’ve always been kind of curious how critical intonation is in Japanese compared to English. Anecdotally I’ve felt like it doesn’t affect how understandable English is by too much, but I’ve probably just internalized the “correct” ways and can’t imagine anything else
azul@mcc > in Japanese it is COMPLETELY CRITICAL you pronounce each one exactly or you will not be understood.
True, although if you take into account devoicing, duration, and pitch accent, there is still more than one way to pronounce a vowel in Japanese.
@typeswitch it is still critical the base vowel, in the sense that an English speaker would interpret it, be pronounced correctly
@mcc yes, although devoicing probably does makes a big enough difference -- e.g. utsukushii (beautiful) is pronounced utskushii
@mcc also I’ll note that the origin of the “Japanese vowels are easy to learn” is for people who can speak *Romance* languages, which have similar vowels. If you’ve already learned Spanish, you’ve gotten 90% of the way there. (I do think there’s significant differences though, it’s not like vowels are somehow universal)
🇬🇱🇨🇦🇵🇦Just be glad your not learning a language like ǃXóõ or Adyghe!
The phonology of those languages is HARDCORE, to say the least
skry
Vincent KinianIt's worth emphasizing - and many Japanese learning sources never bother with this - how important pitch is. Japanese speakers can differentiate words that use identical kana by applying pitches differently to those kana for each word. This also applies to accents, IE different accents will apply the pitch differently. As a non-native speaker, ignoring pitch can lead to you either sounding weird or at worst, like the two white characters from GaoGaiGar.
@Video_Game_King wait, that last part sounds really funny
Glitchy PixelI was a bit surprised that in English-Japanese classes, there beginner classes focused on the pronunciation of all the sounds.
In Spanish, that takes around 20 minutes specifying the sounds we don't technically have, but we all use already in some onomatopoeia, (in particular, tsu, shi, n and the stress words and compound words).
I guess it's an advantage for Spanish speakers in that regard. In contrast, though, English has so many sounds, it's difficult to get the sounds right for us.