Meh, you'll have a hard time finding your identity then.
For some of us is so easy. I, for instance, am trying to pick some yakuza speak.

I had not noticed how hard would be the japanese R for an english speaker. We have a few different R's here too, but one of them fits well as a japanese sound.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Meh, you'll have a hard time finding your identity then.
For some of us is so easy. I, for instance, am trying to pick some yakuza speak.

I had not noticed how hard would be the japanese R for an english speaker. We have a few different R's here too, but one of them fits well as a japanese sound.

For that matter, isn't the Portuguese rolled/trilled R slightly closer to a french rolled/trilled R than a "yakuza" rolled/trilled R?

Or maybe it's like a Spanish R. Or a voiceless velar fricative. Or a voiceless uvular fricative.

As you can clearly see, I know nothing of Portuguese.

We have all of them.

In the city where I was born, people use the R from the yakuza. In the city I grew up, Florianopolis, people use the french R from "mon cherry".

Native people here in Florianopolis speak really fast. There are some regions of the country where people speak really slow, like in Bahia. Our vocabulary is almost the same, but Bahians cannot understand us without a bit of practice.

There is another place, called Minas Gerais, where people speak only the first half of the words. Again, the vocabulary is the same, but sometimes it is hard to understand them.

Portuguese from all over the country sounds kinda different.
Portuguese from other countries sounds a LOT different. Sometimes is somehow easier to understand Spanish from Argentina, than portuguese from Portugal.

Wow, nice explanation of らりるれろ. I thought I had it pretty much down, but that helped me, thanks.

samesong Wrote:-ふ
Correct way: purse your lips like you're going to give somebody a peck on the cheek, but open them slightly. Bring air up all the way from your chest, and push that air out, like blowing out a candle. If you over-emphasize it, you'll actually feel your stomach muscles slightly contracting.

Incorrect way: Connecting the bottom of your lip with your upper row of teeth and forcing air out solely through your mouth. This is an English F - no place for this sound in Japanese!

But there is the hint of an F sound. Your upper teeth do graze your lower gum after starting the sound and then release again before finishing. It is just no where near as pronounced as in English. I spend a fair amount often fruitless time tring to get my English students to say "Who" without an F sound being included.

Try getting them to say "wood"

edit--

Now that I think about it, my lame joke actually does have some value. The joke being, Japanese people can't make the "woo" sound in wood. But this is a good measure to see if you are pronouncing the Japanese ふ correctly; if you feel the same muscles around your mouth being used to form the "wood" sound when pronouncing ふ, then you are saying it incorrectly.

thermal Wrote:But there is the hint of an F sound. Your upper teeth do graze your lower gum after starting the sound and then release again before finishing.

Is that even anatomically possible? You must have long teeth!

Didn't you know Thermal is a rabbit? How inconsiderate of you.

Hmm, what I said, but not gum.. ahem. I mean the fleshy part on the inside of your mouth. My upper teeth connect with the flesh about half a center below the start of my lips on the inside of my mouth.

I hear some sort of "f" in ふ. Otherwise I wouldn't have had to pause when someone told me, "I always stay in Oafu when I go to Hawaii." (Oafu? Oh, Oahu...)

ふ just sounds like blowing air to me. Sometimes it seems to have a faint "sh" sound of blowing air. Sometimes a "fu" sound. English "f" sound is from air passing quickly through a tight space where the top teeth are touching the lower lip. It makes sense the "f" sound can still occur without this, only it's a lighter sound.

Blow air like you're trying to annoy a dog or blow out a candle (though not quite that hard) and add an う sound to it. That's somewhat similar.

If you speak Spanish (at least with a "clean" accent like Madrid or "upper class" Mexican--won't apply to cubans, andalucian and other heavy accents), you'll already have a pretty firm grasp of vowel sounds and overall pronunciation. The rolled R works very well for ryu, ryo, etc.. Sounds much closer than "d'yu" "d'yo." The thing you'll need to work on will be deemphasis of syllables.

You'll find the pronunciation of words that happen to be shared in common (coincidentally in many cases) to be identical: mono, pan, chi-chi, kasa/casa, kaka/caca, etc..

Back from a brief hiatus. My computer died recently, which set me way back in my studies since I don't have any physical kanji flashcards and was cut off from the net, my main source of spoken Japanese input. Thanks for all the help guys. I will definitely use "shadowing" and the other advice provided.

Just a bit of warning, identical is saying too much.

They relate a lot, but are not really identical. These are the things that you only figure out after listening a _lot_.

When I started working on my pronunciation I was overconfident. Only because Portuguese sounds relate much more to Japanese sounds than English I thought I should simply talk like I do in Portuguese. But someday, I was watching the news and there were these Brazilian expatriate in japan being interviewed in succession and meh, their pronunciation was horrible. I don't want to sound like those people!

Record your voice, hear it and make your own conclusions.