So, anyone here have troubles with certain combinations of sounds? For me it's the ん/れ (or any other sort of ら sound following the ん) Examples: 森羅万象, or 連絡. I have to work extra hard at sliding that uvular sound into an alveolar whatchamacallit. It drives me nuts, because everything else I'm golden, but with those types of words I always end up having to enunciate several times before I get it down properly.

Doesn't the 'r' just turn into a more distinct 'l'? 'shinlabanshou', 'r/lenlak'?

The Japanese lateral approximate is probably my favorite difference to English pronunciation. I like how it slides between the 'r' and 'l' sounds

As far as I can hear the correct sound would come out more similar to a 'd' than an 'l', or in between. 混乱 sounds ALMOST like こんだん. Of course it's a rough approximation, so it should not be taken too seriously.

Hmm... 連絡「れんらく」 is tough, but Japanese probably have it worse with R vs L.

Yes, I find that if I am not careful, I don't type/pronounce 道路「どうろ」correctly.

I thought that ん before /r/ is like a nasalized n (similar to French garcon, pain, maison, etc.) where your tongue does not contact the top of your mouth anywhere. Then the /r/ is just like a normal /r/.

But yeah, I have trouble with that, and ん before a vowel too, like げんいん, はんい.

I used to have trouble with りゃ・りゅ・りょ but I'm OK with them now.

I have trouble with the same... making the ら、り、る、れ、ろ　after ん and making sure to distinguish the elongated vowels or keeping straight which ones are long. 道路 is one and 旅行 is another. Just need more exposure I guess to make it come out without thinking.

I also tend to struggle with the softened R sounds (Ry-). りゃ、りゅ、りょ. I have to think of it as an L or a D in order to get it to come out right. I think L tends to work better since my English D sound can come out too hard. But I remember seeing a Japanese elementary student get corrected by a teacher for having written だ instead of ら, so making R to D switch is probably fine (at least in some phonetic situations).

Thank god for knowing spanish.

You lucky cat you

The first time I had to say 遊ばせました【あそばせました】 I was completely stuck. It just couldn't come out, whenever there's something that's difficult to pronounce, read it out loud 10+ times until you can do it. Now that word will come out very naturally without me sounding like an idiot.

Erubey Wrote:Thank god for knowing spanish.

Speaking of that... is there really a town called "escondido" in California? Or are you making a Spanish joke:

Location?
...escondido....
[switches to english]
actually...california...

nest0r Wrote:

Erubey Wrote:Thank god for knowing spanish.

I would trade all of my hard-won Japanese skills if only I could trill my Rs.

Oh goodness, me too.

Tricky pronunciation? Try pronouncing these:

??????? ?? ?

Pimsleur can be useful, but the Korean Pimsleur tapes are so incredibly innacurate that I could never trust the Japanese ones either. I was initially saying "Hello, there are Australians" instead of "Hello, I'm Australian" after trying to learn korean with pimsleur, not that you could actually learn the word "australian" with pimsleur, they'd cocked up on the grammar side. Lucky those things are on torrents, you'd have to be mad to pay $100+ on something riddled with errors.

Are you talking about fixing my broken tongue or pronouncing those kanji that probably aren't even in most people's unicode kanji fonts?
I tried making a kanji avatar out of one of those kanji, and it didn't even let me!

nest0r Wrote:

playadom Wrote:Are you talking about fixing my broken tongue or pronouncing those kanji that probably aren't even in most people's unicode kanji fonts?
I tried making a kanji avatar out of one of those kanji, and it didn't even let me!

Yea, I couldn't figure out what kind of joke you were making with a strangely grouped set of question marks. The tongue was what I meant. Trade it for the robot devil's TTS tongue (if TTS engines can do that sound?).

Hahahahhahahaha load up on fonts:

http://http.netscape.com.edgesuite.net/p...berbit.ZIP

It's worth it.

playadom Wrote:

Erubey Wrote:Thank god for knowing spanish.

Speaking of that... is there really a town called "escondido" in California? Or are you making a Spanish joke:

Location?
...escondido....
[switches to english]
actually...california...

Its a real town. A lot of the places in southern california are like this. Good catch

Erubey Wrote:

playadom Wrote:

Erubey Wrote:Thank god for knowing spanish.

Speaking of that... is there really a town called "escondido" in California? Or are you making a Spanish joke:

Location?
...escondido....
[switches to english]
actually...california...

Its a real town. A lot of the places in southern california are like this. Good catch

It's especially interesting that your place name is split up onto two lines.

Stuff like　千円 The way I hear it, it's not straight 「せんえん」　but more 「せええん」
Also 「保健室」や「寝室」とか。Most of the time I can pull these two off, but in a long sentence it sometimes ends in failure DX

Nuriko Wrote:Stuff like　千円 The way I hear it, it's not straight 「せんえん」　but more 「せええん」

Have you noticed that sometimes they actually pronounce it 「せんいえん」(but いえ are a single sound)?

Taberarimasen took me ages to actually pronounce right i would always mix the ra and ri together to make a horrible sound. I also still struggle with one of the first words i ever learnt "suminasen" why? i have no idea, i can say much more complicated words than that one yet it always gives me trouble.

Part of the problem might be that they're actually taberaremasen and sumimasen...

passive/potential (一段) can be kindof annoying to say though... well, actually, not in general, but 虐げられる has always given me a headache.

I remember struggling for a really long time with 笑われました. Actually 現れる still trips me up sometimes.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Part of the problem might be that they're actually taberaremasen and sumimasen...

passive/potential (一段) can be kindof annoying to say though... well, actually, not in general, but 虐げられる has always given me a headache.

Ah.. well that shows i have a bad ear for Japanese as I have only heard them but not seen them written down. I think you have just made taberaremasen even harder for me now! though sumimasen is much easier.

shakkun Wrote:I remember struggling for a really long time with 笑われました. Actually 現れる still trips me up sometimes.

現れる has never given me trouble as far as pronunciation (I mean, beyond my standard pronunciation woes, ho ho ho), but it was always a pain to remember what on earth the order the sounds went in. あわられる？あらわれる？あれらわられられれれ…る？ Kind of like the name 小笠原. The first time I encountered a character with that name, I wasn't particularly familiar with kanji (or vocabulary) at all, so there weren't really any clues to help me out. I could never, ever remember her name (おがさわら).
In hindsight, they all seem ridiculously simple. I guess you get used to it. That's still too many As for any one name, though. Leave some for everybody else, guys. C'mon

しち. 七時. GUH.