I am trying to improve my pronunciation, and one of the most difficult things I come up against is the problem of aspirated plosives

That is, the unvoiced plosives - T, K and P - in English are pronounced with aspiration (described as a small puff of air). As I understand it this is accompanied by a fractional delay between the plosive and the following vowel.

In practice that means that Japanese people hear (and transliterate), for example, English "ka" as キャ. So Candy→キャンディー.

The real problem here is that, like many people, I can't actually hear the difference, so it is very hard to correct.

I've done some reading around and the usual tips seem to be that English plosives are not (or are less, depending on whom you listen to) aspirated when preceded by s, so in:

Score, core
Spore, pore
Store, tore

Only the second word of each pair has an aspirated plosive in English.

I have heard advice to use a candle or a kleenex to demonstrate the puff of air emitted on plosives (I don't find it very conclusive).

And also some people say that voiced plosives G, B, D are unaspirated in English.

None of this is helping me a lot with de-aspirating my plosives, as it all feels a bit vague (there is also a lot of technical information about VOT etc, which is of even less practical help).

Is anyone else wrestling with this problem? Does anyone have any more concrete tips (tongue position for example - I know it isn't technically connected with aspiration but there may be ways of "tricking" the mouth as it were)?

破裂音の「ハ」を除けたいんですから。

PS I know this isn't necessary for semantic purposes, but I don't want my Japanese to sound "heavy".

The way I feel them it's a diaphragm pulse that gives the aspiration. If you put your hand near your plexus you can feel it. And indeed scot/spot/stop are without diaphragm tremor. Can't think of a good exercice now though.

In Japanese class in university I was taught to put my tongue more forward in my mouth when making a 't' sound in Japanese (Edit: Basically, up against my front teeth). That way there's not a big pocket of air for your tongue to push forward.

I don't really know about how tongue movement might be different for 'p' and 'k' though.

Hi, have you tried listening to minimal pairs? That is, a short recording of two phonemes. In your case, it would be a voiced consonant, say P, followed immediately by its unvoiced counterpart. Listening to a minimal pairing on repeat for a period of time has been used to help adults distinguish pairings they couldn't tell apart initially.

Tzadeck Wrote:In Japanese class in university I was taught to put my tongue more forward in my mouth when making a 't' sound in Japanese. That way there's not a big pocket of air for your tongue to push forward.

I don't really know about how tongue movement might be different for 'p' and 'k' though.

For me the tongue just doesn't make as long of a contact on the roof of the mouth for "k". "p" I'm not sure exactly how it works.

Minasan, thank you SO much for your kind suggestions.

EratiK-san, I am trying the diaphragm method but I don't seem to feel any difference. They told me when I came to life that my body was "functionally human" but I am not sure I believe it. It doesn't all seem to work the same. I will go on trying.

Tzadeck-san, That is interesting. I have been experimenting with putting the tongue further forward and also back behind (not on) the alveolar ridge which also seems to make for a lighter, crisper contact.

Yudantaiteki-san, Yes, a less long contact sounds right from what I have read.

It is all so painfully theoretical when one can't hear the difference properly! I have been kind of trying to pull the tongue slightly in a backward rather than forward direction on K and T too, on the theory that the body is less likely to think of "puffing" when there is a backward impetus.

But that may just be Dolly nonsense.

I am really interested in the idea of minimal pairs, but where might one find them? The idea was new to me so I looked it up, and it seems to revolve around pairs of words (with a phonemic difference) in the same language. However, as I understand it Japanese does not use aspirated plosives in any setting (even its representation of Engish aspirated plosives does not involve aspiration). How would one go about finding recordings of such pairs?

Thank you all again.

If you haven't checked out forvo.com, it's a good resource for pronunciation. I can't help you with the specifics of the sounds, as I'm doing RTK to learn Hanja for Korean, and know nothing about Japanese. However, unlike English, Korean writing distinguishes voiced from unvoiced consonants. So in case you might find them useful, I'm posting some links to words I found on forvo.

http://www.forvo.com/word/%ED%86%A0%EC%9A%94%EC%9D%BC/
http://www.forvo.com/word/%EB%96%A1%EB%B3%B6%EC%9D%B4/
In this pairing, the first word starts with an unvoiced T, and the second with a voiced T.

http://www.forvo.com/word/%ED%8F%AC%EB%8F%84/#ko
http://www.forvo.com/word/%EB%B9%A8%EB%A6%AC/#ko
In this pairing, voiced and unvoiced P are contrasted.

In pronouncing these words myself, I notice some differences in anatomical positioning, but since you're not learning Korean, I don't know how helpful these observations will be to you.

Thank you SO much for this. Just to check, when you say "voiced" I think you mean "aspirated" here (I have mixed the two words myself) since English does of course differentiate between voiced and unvoiced plosives, as does Japanese. Not being picky. It's just that since my problem is with hearing the thing in the first place, I need to be sure.

For others following this thread, I found an aspirated/unaspirated K-pair here:

http://www.latvianstuff.com/Aspirated_Unaspirated.html

It is English Cuss vs Latvian (unaspirated) Kas. If I find any actual English/Japanese examples I will post them.

Again thank you for this. It is very helpful.

My suggestion: don't study pronunciation like this. Your making it way too technical. I recommend 4 things that require mini mal effort but will allow you to develop your Japanese accent naturally: listen more, shadow (repeat after a native speaker speaking naturally in a recording) daily, sing or rap and get an idea in your mind of how a word should sound so that you can try to consciously improve your sound, not your technique. Its like when someone tells you how to whistle and you do it but it doesn't work; it's only when you relax and just try to whistle without thinking about technique that you do it right.

I never looked for any technical help with pronounciation, I just did these 4 things (especially listening aaaaalll the time) just in my normal day, never taking thwm seriously or sweating if i didnt do them one day and when I got my first Japanese lesson after a year of self study the first thing my native teacher said to me was "wow, your pronunciation is really good. I actually can't correct it."

Thank you, Helena-san. I am doing shadowing (or a related technique of my own that I call "harmonizing") and watching a lot of anime.

I hope it is getting me nearer to good pronunciation. I am told my Japanese is mostly understandable and my pronunciation is good, but obviously it is accented. The problem with plosives (and I agree, I hate this technical route, I am horribly bad at it and it isn't the organic way to learn) is that Japanese plosives sound just like English plosives to me. I can't hear any difference, so that aspect isn't improving.

I'll offer the counterpoint, that my pronunciation had basic problems in it even after 5 years of study, including 2 years living in Japan and having passed JLPT1. It wasn't until I went to grad school and started studying pronunciation that I figured out some of the basic errors I had been making.

This may be a bit of a big question but what were the main errors?

This isn't idle curiosity. I am interested to know what errors a clearly proficient speaker like yourself may be subject to. Plosives are one area that for me is un-self-diagnosable (because I can't hear them). In other areas I am hoping things like shadowing and exposure will get me where I am going.

But I would really value your experience on what some of the pitfalls might be.

よろしくお願いします。

I second Yudantaiteki with studying phonology. I had a pretty atrocious american accent, and while I don't have an exact native accent, I do have a very minimal american one.

What I would suggest, is to set aside some time and study a basic linguistics course or if your motivated the phonology pages on wikipedia. First, learn the word definitions, and what sounds are in your dialect. Next, start adding sounds that you want to learn slowly, by practicing the various features. eg unaspirated consonants or palatalized fricatives. The key thing to keep in mind isn't "can I hear this sound" it's "is my mouth doing the correct things"

CureDolly Wrote:This may be a bit of a big question but what were the main errors?

This isn't idle curiosity. I am interested to know what errors a clearly proficient speaker like yourself may be subject to. Plosives are one area that for me is un-self-diagnosable (because I can't hear them). In other areas I am hoping things like shadowing and exposure will get me where I am going.

But I would really value your experience on what some of the pitfalls might be.

よろしくお願いします。

For me, these were the biggest problems:
- ひ is not pronounced like English "he"
- ん has various pronunciations, but most of the time is a nasal vowel instead of the consonant "n"
- "Whispered mora" or whatever you want to call it; it's the phenomenon where して sounds like "shte" (with the "i" vowel reduced or eliminated).

I'm not sure why I never realized these until I explicitly read about them or had them pointed out to me -- it wasn't until several years into my graduate school that one of my professors told me I was pronouncing 人 wrong, for instance.

A number of people here claim to have developed excellent pronunciation naturally, without ever really working at it. This may work for some people, but it didn't for me, and I think it's foolish to assume that it will work for you (general "you", not CureDolly specifically).

"Studying phonology" is not necessarily something I recommend since it's a fairly complicated subject. One good resource for a short description of the Japanese sounds is the first volume of Japanese: The Spoken Language; if you try to read that at the beginning of your Japanese studies it makes no sense, but once you have a fair amount of experience there's a lot of useful information in there.

@RandomQuotes-san

Well this rather brings me back to my starting point. I do know a little basic phonology. I understand the theory behind aspirated/unaspirated plosives (to take this example) and precisely what I was asking was "Is there a correct thing my mouth should be doing?"

I have some research and I can't seem to find anything very definite.

I was also asking "is there a way to hear/diagnose the correct sound" because I believe that is important too. I do take Helena-san's point about whistling.

However if there were precise and followable information on the correct things my mouth should be doing in this case, that is exactly what I am looking for.

For specifically unaspirated consonants, I believe the way I practiced that was by silently whispering the consonant. That should be fairly simple. I, then, slowly added a voiced vowel afterwards. It took roughly 2 weeks to a month to be able to it pretty regularly without concerted effort.

@yudantaiteki-san

Thank you so much for taking the trouble to explain this. Actually it is a little reassuring to me, because I am aware of the issues you mention and think I know how to work on them.

I think it is possible to develop good pronunciation naturally or methodically and different methods work better for different people. Of course how good one's pronunciation actually is can also be hard to diagnose. I have been told by some native speakers (including sensei) that my pronunciation is excellent, and while I am grateful for their kindness, I am well aware that this is unlikely to be the case at this stage. そんなこと・・・

My first concern (because, unlike aspirated/unaspirated plosives, it is important to understanding and being understood) is mora rhythm. This is the thing I pay the most attention to in my "harmonizing" work.

The understanding that syllabic ん and "whispered morae" are still morae is vital, I think, and an interesting "case" in the discussion you raised between "natural" acquisition of correct pronunciation and theoretical learning on the subject.

My belief is that one really needs both (though of the two the one that can work most successfully alone is the natural one, provided one has an unusually good ear, I would think).

My ear is far from perfect, and my ability to apply theory is not wonderful either, so I certainly need both.

In the case of morae that do not "seem" like syllables to an ear accustomed to West European languages, one can see the two methods working in tandem, at least the way I approach it.

One needs to "hear" and, in my case shadow, or "harmonize" in the light of the theoretical knowledge that those non-syllables are morae. And one needs to "catch the rhythm" which I at least couldn't have done without the help of a little prior theoretical input.

This is not "blind theory" (like trying to whistle from written instruction list), neither is it "natural listening", which, in my experience, is too prone to being post-processed by the mind into the kind of sound structures it wants to hear (ie is used to). Kind of allowing each approach to correct the deficiencies of the other.

Thank you so much for the book recommendation. I really wanted some theoretical help specific to Japanese. I have some understanding (I think I know how ひ works, for example - the constriction of the air by the back of the tongue, unlike the English hi in "his" in which it is unimpeded) but I am thirsty for more exact understanding.

And thank you again, senpai, for taking the time to explain.

I doubt it'll help, but I remember reading about aspiration on Wiki a while back. The consonants you mentioned are still aspirated, but just less so than the English equivalents.

Quote:Voiceless stops /p, t, k/ are slightly aspirated: less aspirated than English stops, but more so than Spanish.

Personally, it just kind of clicked one day through listening for me. It's impossible to get anywhere near a tongue twister like this with English sounds: 東京特許許可局局長. Maybe practising with longer words that contain many of these sounds will help more than individual mora.

Just a side note, but I don't think vowels should be underestimated either. Your mouth will always be out of position if you're not doing them correctly, so everything sounds off. I always wondered why my り was so terrible until I worked on my い.

The kind of training announcers do is called 発声練習, and I've seen a video or two that focused on mouth/tongue position for vowels, but I can't seem to find them. It might be worth checking out for other sounds too.

RandomQuotes Wrote:For specifically unaspirated consonants, I believe the way I practiced that was by silently whispering the consonant. That should be fairly simple. I, then, slowly added a voiced vowel afterwards. It took roughly 2 weeks to a month to be able to it pretty regularly without concerted effort.

I am a little confused here. As I understand it, whispered unvoiced plosives are still aspirated by English speakers. Also whispered voiced plosives are in fact unvoiced plosives (because a whisper has no voicing by definition).

So if an English-speaking person is asked to loudly whisper "got" and "cot" the two sounds will be identical except for the aspiration, because the velar plosive in "got" is unvoiced. What she will tend to do to draw a distinction is to emphasize the aspiration of the unvoiced plosive in "cot" (since aspiration is, in English, a mark of an unvoiced plosive).

However, if she whispers "got" she should in fact be saying "cot" with an unaspirated "ko", because the "go" is devoiced by whispering but because the speaker is thinking of it as "go" she doesn't aspirate it.

Thus she has "tricked" herself into producing an unaspirated plosive and now what she needs to do is bring back the voicing of the vowel without either voicing the consonant or introducing aspiration.

Does this seem right?

It really seems to me like a good route to follow.

Jimeux-san, thank you so much.

I think there is really no such thing, technically, as an unaspirated plosive, since it is air that "plodes" after all. It is really a matter of how much of it there is and how far it makes a "gap" between the plosive and the following vowel.

So in a way just "keeping it light" is good advice I think, except that I have been told that my plosives are still aspirated. It's very hard when you can't hear for yourself.

You are so right about tongue twisters. The "heavier" pronunciation of English does make them near impossible and I have been working on this somewhat (though more by serendipity than intention) in my "harmonizing". A lot of ordinary Japanese sentences are 早口言葉 when approached with too Anglophone a mouth. Even an everyday word like 温かかった really demands a much lighter foot on the gas pedal!

That is very good advice about vowels, thank you. I will look for 発声練習 videos.

That's why I said silently. As in if you can hear any breath coming out, it's too loud. Like when you're trying to silently talk to someone discreetly so you just mouth the words. That's what I mean by silently whisper here. Not a true whisperer, which just devoices everything.

But yes, you have the basic idea right. Start with something that you can do, and alter it slightly, then continue this pattern of practice-alter, practice-alter.

EDIT:
There are unaspirated plosives, however when they are unaspirated, people tend to call them stops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenuis_consonant

Ah thank you. I understand now. This really is very helpful.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I'll offer the counterpoint, that my pronunciation had basic problems in it even after 5 years of study, including 2 years living in Japan and having passed JLPT1. It wasn't until I went to grad school and started studying pronunciation that I figured out some of the basic errors I had been making.

Really? Were you doing those 4 things I suggested regularly though? I can't believe that if you did those every day (even though I said I didn't sweat if I didn't do them every day, I did do most every day without much thought) that your pronunciation would not improve! If you are shadowing to sound just like the speaker, then changing the ひ sound should come naturally as you try to match your sound with theirs. See my "btw" note at the bottom if you want to know more about how I shadow.

Hmmm, I think a problem some people have is that they don't listen to a lot of native audio early on and don't think about pronunciation early on, so get some unconscious misconceptions in their mind that are more easily removed by a pronunciation class than the more natural way. From the day I decided to learn Japanese seriously, I was watching dramas without subs and I was constantly learning songs and only listening to Japanese music and some podcasts. I think that is the most likely case. However, I don't know how old you were when you started learning but it could be a matter of age. I was 15 when I started learning (I'm almost 17 now). Nevertheless, scientifically, I think your accent is set when you are about 12 (or at least by puberty, some people say, and I'm a girl so that's about 13) so that's why I say my last point is the more likely case.

@Cure dolly
If you're doing all those things and you really want to tackle a specific area I guess that's quite pragmatic of you, and the combination will probably work. I need to learn to be more focused in my studies like that, rooting out the weak areas effectively.

BTW (this is to everyone). My technique of shadowing is two fold: I shadow whatever native Japanese audio I'm listening to whenever I feel like it, mostly when someone has said something in a dramatic way because it is easier to do an over the top impression than a calm one, but as I get into the flow I can start to shadow most of it, trying to really match my sounds with theirs, right down to the emotion and stress they put in each syllable, like an actor, but I only shadow other females so I don't sound like a man; and then I shadow one specific person, a celebrity (again female) who I chose as my pretend Japanese parent - the person I will sound the most like, and I do this with a LIMITED amount of videos (yes videos, this means I can now watch how their whole body moves and take that spirit of being an actor even further, which always helps). After shadowing intensively the second way, I usually read something aloud until I get bored and then talk to myself a bit, trying to maintain the pronunciation I just practised.

This method stops you from getting confused by different accents as you are focusing on one specific person's pronunciation, but shadowing other things stops you from sounding like a clone of that person. Make sure you know where this person is from. You may want a born and bred Tokyoite, but I don't really care so got someone from Nagoya who spent her teenage years in Osaka, just because I think she's cool and I like the way she speaks (that's important too, you must genuinely like their voice otherwise you'll just sound weird to yourself).

すごいね！

I really like your way of shadowing, Helena-san. When I read that I feel pretty convinced that you have developed a very good accent. I don't think it is a method everyone can use. We all work differently. I find shadowing very difficult and couldn't manage it at all until I discovered a particular method and then developed it into something I call "harmonizing". Frankly, compared to your work it is very wooden, but it's the best this poor doll can manage. I mean if I had been made a century ago I probably would have been wooden myself.

I listen to native audio and watch native material a lot. In fact I don't use any non-Japanese media at all. Not a 我慢 thing. That's what I enjoy. I never found much that I really liked that wasn't Japanese even back when I was stuck with English subtitles. I also read Japanese books and play Japanese visual novels. My Japanese 3DS won't even play non-Japanese games. I don't mind region-locking so long as I'm locked into the right region!

I don't sing though. I should, shouldn't I?

One thing that worries me about not doing some specific vocal study is that the mind has a horrible tendency to post-process what it hears into what it finds more familiar. This is especially a problem with mora-timing because European-language ears naturally parse what they hear into syllables rather than morae.

Having said that, I believe you are throwing yourself into the spirit of Japanese in a way that means you are probably catching the rhythm naturally and getting it into your bloodstream. I absolutely believe that organic is best wherever you can do it. 羨ましい.

I am thinking about looking for a pretend Japanese parent to shadow!

I hesitate to mention something so obvious, but have you tried recording your voice and listening back to it?

I understand doing so can be quite useful.