I'm using khatzumoto's Sentence Starter Pack 1, found here.

I'm using the TTS voice Misaki16 (Japanese female). It's the only Japanese voice I could find.

When I ask her to read the sentence 教えてくれて有り難う, she reads the kanji 難 using its ナン reading. So the 有り難う part comes out as "arinan".

This reading is incorrect. 有り難う is the familiar "arigatou", which khatzumoto confirms in his kana transcript: おし・えて　呉れて　あ・り　がと・う (PL2).

I can't believe that the software is making such a basic mistake, so I must be confusing things somehow. Perhaps the sentence is taken out of context, or something.

I'd appreciate it if someone could compare my output with their own. If I'm making a mistake in my reasoning, please let me know.

Thanks!

ありがとう　can be written both as 有り難う　and 有難う.

Doing a quick Google search shows that 有難う is far more common (37 million hits) than 有り難う (7.6 million). Try using the more common reading and see if it reads it back to you correctly.

Thanks, 有難う was indeed pronounced "arigatou".

I also discovered that there's an option to manually edit pronunciation of words. But it's weird...I told her to pronounce 有り難う as ありがとう, and the problem still occurred.

I then told her how I wanted the whole sentence 教えてくれて有り難う pronounced -- as おしえて呉れてありがとう -- and it seems to have worked.

Thanks for the help.

That's extremely odd 漢字使い, using 有り難う and 呉れる...

I remember hearing somewhere about Khatz's kanji choices being rather strange.

Khatz overuses kanji generally, I assume because he likes them or something. Writing ありがとう and くれる with kanji is uncommon.

uberstuber Wrote:Khatz overuses kanji generally, I assume because he likes them or something. Writing ありがとう and くれる with kanji is uncommon.

Heck, I love words[english vocab], but doesn't mean I talk with a big, awkward, and stuck-up vocabulary all the time.

I think he does it because he said he tried to over kanjify his srs sentences in the beginning to get more kanji practice, so now this habit seems to be stuck.

I thought his reasoning was something like if a Japanese person can look at the word 有り難う and know it's ありがとう even if they themselves always write it ありがとう, then it should be learned in the kanji form so that you won't end up unable to understand a word you already know due to kanji. But you can end up writing things strangely if you don't actually read enough real life Japanese to know which words don't usually use their kanji.

There are many words that can be written as kanji couples or with kana in between

取り引き・取引

Yey....

abdwef, out of interest, what are your other sources for sentences?

First time in my life I've seen someone write arigatou in kanji, outside of my dictionary. It one of the things that annoys me about Khatz' writing, overuse of kanji. The way kanji are used, or rather, not used, seems to be some kind of set rules of 'proper kanji use' that all the Japanese people learn, but I've never seen a textbook explain. I just collect my sentences, and don't artificially insert kanji where they weren't in the original sentence. After all that will teach the most natural written Japanese.