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I'm currently working my way throgh core 6000, and two sentences have caught my attention. They both involve an ん after an え (the vowel sound, not the hirigana) and before an い. It sounds to me like they are being pronounced ええい instead of えんい.
Is this normal? I think it's the same woman saying both sentences, so I'm wondering if this is something I should be imitating or not.
The sentences are:
博士はその道の権威（けんい）です。(This one is from memory, so may be completely wrong.)
彼女は臨時の店員（てんいん）です。
Thanks for any help.
Edited: 2011-01-09, 9:42 am
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Before a vowel, ん is articulated lightly at the back of the mouth, like the ng in "sing," but softer. This is subtle enough to be confused with just extending the previous vowel sound, and sometimes it's so subtle that they actually are just extending the previous vowel sound.
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It's nasalization. Japanese ん basically has 6 different pronunciations depending on the sound it is followed. For example, it is realized as a nasal vowel before a vowel, s, h, w, etc. So ん in けんい becomes the nasal version of い.
If you're not familiar with the notion of nasal vowels vs. oral vowels, you can check if your accent in English has it. For instance, pronounce the following two words:
bead (the "e" vowel is oral)
bean (the "e" vowel is nasal)
I don't know if you pronounce the vowels differently, but it seems the latter vowel is realized as the nasal version of the former in many American accents. Because they're allophones of the exact same phoneme, you may not be able to pick up on the difference even if you're pronouncing them differently; most of the time native speakers think they're exactly the same even though they're automatically pronouncing them differently. You can physically feel the difference by pinching your nose and say the two words if your accent has the nasal vowel. If it's kind of difficult to pronounce the vowel when saying "bean" but "bead" is no problem, then that difficult vowel is the nasal version.
So んs in けんい and てんいん are actually vowels with nasalization like "e" in "bean."
Here are very rough rules of how ん is pronounced:
ん is realized as:
m if the following sound is a bilabial consonant,
n if the following sound is an alveolar consonant,
palatalized n if the following sound is a postalveolar consonant,
ng (= "n" in "bank") if the following sound is a velar consonant,
N (uvular nasal) if it is at the end of a word,
a nasal vowel otherwise. (<- This is the ん in your examples.)
Edited: 2011-01-09, 9:14 am
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Can anyone recommend a specific book or resource on phonology, or the pronunciation rules for Japanese?
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Where did you read about it? It's not that I'm ignoring pronunciation. It's just that the beginner Japanese stuff I've read doesn't really go in to it, and that creates the impression that it is as simple as learning that が is pronouced ga, etc. The different sound of the language is a large part of what caught my interest, but it's quickly becoming apparent that I need more information, so if you know any good resources please tell me.
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"Pronounce it Perfectly in Japanese" was one of the first things I bought when I started studying on my own, but the sound of Japanese was so unfamiliar to me at the time that I found it overwhelming and incomprehensible. However, I just pulled it out again last week and I'm really glad I did.
Among other things, I like that PPJ tells you HOW to produce the sounds physiologically, explaining, for instance, that you do not round your lips to pronounce 'お', as you would 'o'. And it's also cleared up the mystifying (to me) pronunciation of 人, as in あの人. It makes me think that improving my own pronunciation will help improve my listening comprehension as well.
Note to beginners: I can see now that it would have been much better for me to have kept at it in the beginning, while I was still using romaji, because 'reading' Japanese words in English reinforced my English pronunciation of the syllables/morae.
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JimmySeal,
you're missing my point. I meant PRONUNCIATION courses, not handbooks with audio.
There are plenty of them, but none of them (except some Russian ones) cover PRONUNCIATION.
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We probably just misunderstand each other.
I mean grammar courses not handbooks with dialogues about nothing in particular with half the book in romaji.
By grammar courses I mean for example:
Kaiser, Ichikawa - Japanese A Comprehensive Grammar
Makino - Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
Makino, S.; M. Tsutsui - A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar
Makino, S.; M. Tsutsui - A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar
Chino Naoko - All About Particles
etc.
Never seen any grammar course that comes with audio.
EDIT
For some reason many of my posts are posted twice, I press Submit buttons only once, though.
Edited: 2011-01-10, 7:17 am
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It seems that by "grammar course," you mean "grammar reference book" and I don't see why it would make a whole lot of sense to have grammar reference books come with audio, when there are plenty of other fine sources of audio, including the ones I mentioned.
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I don't see much point in audio designed specifically for pronunciation. Between the many sources of clear audio, ranging from single word sources like JDIC, to smart.fm, to expansive native materials (w/ prosody) enabled via subs2srs...
Edited: 2011-01-10, 8:01 am
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nest0r,
I agree you do not see much point.
I do.
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Thora,
there are people who like to overcomplicate things... to make them simpler. I'm one of them.
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I agree with buonaparte...
Wouldn't it be hugely beneficial at the beginner (still learning grammar) stage if all the decent grammar reference books were in digital format with all the sample sentences read by native speakers? this way you'd be learning correct pronunciation from the outset, and wouldn't need a lot of work to fix it later. Courses like Pimsleur are great for just this reason, but they don't really cover much. If you could do pimsleur, followed by reading through A Dictionary of basic Japanese Grammar (with sentences read by natives), that would be much better than reading through it sans any audio, and I think it would probably be a bridging step to making real content more accessible.
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If we're simply talking about having good audio for every resource, I also want this, or rather, wouldn't mind having clear native audio for Japanese the Manga Way, Dictionary of Japanese Grammar, etc. But from the other perspective, I'd rather have native material corpora flexibly integrated with common linguistic patterns/grammatical principles. Ex: Japanese the Manga Way in structure but with variable examples.
Learning pronunciation would come incidentally from developing a mental corpus and native-like intuition as as result of close/extensive (condensed) listening, speaking, and subvocalization, with occasional consultation for the ever-rarer instances of problematic interpretation of phonology.
Edited: 2011-01-11, 4:00 am
