She seems to be about the same ability as most people I know who have been studying for about 2 years and are motivated.

@ Nestor

Here's the thing: how is an absolute beginner supposed to figure out what "makes sense" to them? After trying countless methods over the last few years only to have some blow up in my face months later when I finally realized they weren't working as well as they should be, even now I can't say 100 percent what makes sense. Strategies for language acquisition are not always intuitive, and critical thinking about methods will only get you so far unless there are scientific studies to back you up. Khatzu has some scientific and theoretical support, but not for everything he says. If motivation is what most people get out of Khatzu's site, then great. But chances are that a lot of people are buying into all or most of Khatzu's ideas simply because of his extraordinary claim of fluency within a short time. I agree that lots of Khatzu's ideas are good, but I think he too strongly affirms some things and rejects others that might work very well.

sutebun Wrote:I hear you. I am 22 as well. I wasn't even "unserious" or taking Japanese lightly back then -- I wasn't studying it at all. Didn't start until I was 20...

And the phonetics thing isn't really a big deal. There are only about three sounds that Japanese plainly has and English just does not. There are many small differences in the way we pronounce things, but phonetics is still one of the easier aspects of the language. Seriously, I love learning Japanese because the challenge is in learning new vocabulary/kanji/grammar and improving your ability to utilize all that when you speak. The challenge isn't in pronouncing it (unless you're talking about advanced stuff like tones, but that's much higher level).

I'd love to agree with you, but my experience with Japanese language learners is that people usually get really good at Japanese without EVER getting decent at pronouncing it. It seems that people like to think it's easy and start doing other things and forget that they are still really bad at pronouncing it. It's made worse by how polite Japanese people are, claiming your speak "exactly like a Japanese person" when you speak like someone who has studied the language for 5 weeks.

I don't know why, but it seems like so many people continue to use their full mouth to speak Japanese which accounts for a lot of horrible pronunciation mistakes. Correct Japanese seems to be spoken using primarily the front part of the mouth near the teeth. Therefore, I agree that Japanese is simple in pronunciation, but it's hard for some to intentionally limit their speaking range. It's not so much difficult, but rather people making it more difficult than it should be.

To put it another way: For Japanese speakers learning English pronunciation, they must learn new ways of pronunciation. For English speakers learning Japanese, they mainly have to reduce their full vocal range.

Dragg Wrote:I don't know why, but it seems like so many people continue to use their full mouth to speak Japanese which accounts for a lot of horrible pronunciation mistakes. Correct Japanese seems to be spoken using primarily the front part of the mouth near the teeth. Therefore, I agree that Japanese is simple in pronunciation, but it's hard for some to intentionally limit their speaking range. It's not so much difficult, but rather people making it more difficult than it should be.

To put it another way: For Japanese speakers learning English pronunciation, they must learn new ways of pronunciation. For English speakers learning Japanese, they mainly have to reduce their full vocal range.

I wish I learned this sooner. I just came across it recently while trying to mimic a character on screen. At first I was speaking mainly from the back. It sounded similar to Japanese, but actually saying words was difficult (especially with a lot of different consonants). Now trying to exaggerate talking from the front it with as little motion as possible what I'm doing. I'd rather overdue it than under. I still have a very long way to go, but hopefully I'll learn to speak more like a native as a result.

Yo, Tobberoth, I agree with you. I might have expressed my opinion in a wrong way. I wanted to say that she was needing more variety in her collocations. I blame that by lack of vocabulary.

Btw, for checking pronunciation there is a software called babbleback. It is very simple. All it does is play the audio you imediatly recorded.

Tobberoth Wrote:

sutebun Wrote:I hear you. I am 22 as well. I wasn't even "unserious" or taking Japanese lightly back then -- I wasn't studying it at all. Didn't start until I was 20...

And the phonetics thing isn't really a big deal. There are only about three sounds that Japanese plainly has and English just does not. There are many small differences in the way we pronounce things, but phonetics is still one of the easier aspects of the language. Seriously, I love learning Japanese because the challenge is in learning new vocabulary/kanji/grammar and improving your ability to utilize all that when you speak. The challenge isn't in pronouncing it (unless you're talking about advanced stuff like tones, but that's much higher level).

I'd love to agree with you, but my experience with Japanese language learners is that people usually get really good at Japanese without EVER getting decent at pronouncing it. It seems that people like to think it's easy and start doing other things and forget that they are still really bad at pronouncing it. It's made worse by how polite Japanese people are, claiming your speak "exactly like a Japanese person" when you speak like someone who has studied the language for 5 weeks.

You know, the very first episode of the JapanesePod101.com Newbie Lessons Season 2 address this very phenomenon: foreigners properly speaking the language, but not pronouncing it right. As an example (and as a part of the lesson), the teacher explained that when saying ___-jin, the country is said in a flat, high tone, while you go down for the "jin."

vgambit Wrote:You know, the very first episode of the JapanesePod101.com Newbie Lessons Season 2 address this very phenomenon: foreigners properly speaking the language, but not pronouncing it right. As an example (and as a part of the lesson), the teacher explained that when saying ___-jin, the country is said in a flat, high tone, while you go down for the "jin."

That's a good example they are bringing up, but that is a bit above the level of error I'm talking about. I'm talking about people I met in Japan who has studied for quite some time and still has heavy American accent on the "a"s in particular. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, think of the Naruto dub and how they pronounce Naruto. It's not that these people can't speak Japanese, it's just that they seem to be... ignoring how bad it sounds... like "Meh, it's not perfect, but I'm not Japanese so who cares?"

I don't think it's that they have a problem fixing their pronounciation if they wanted to, I think it's more that they don't realize that the error is pretty basic and big and would make their Japanese sounds TON better if they worked on it.

she said tsukurutakkata (wrong), she meant tsukuritakkata (I guess it's understandable) & candan (meant to say cantan - sorry for romaji, too lay to change to etc). and the ore?, I don't get that. I guess from leraning anime you just hear so you don't know if you heard it right.

so many damn EETTO DESU NE. damn annoying.lol.

finnish and japanese. yeah the grammar!! like korean /japanese

I don't have patience to watch her other video.....

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:so many damn EETTO DESU NE. damn annoying.lol.

Pretty much everyone who studies in Japan does that though, it's a bad habit from speaking too much before you can say enough. When thinking of how to word your next phrase, you get stuck in "etto desu ne" constantly. I wouldn't hold it against her, I've seen it in every single Japanese language student I've talked in Japanese with. It disappears with time as you get more comfortable using the language.

Someone posted this as a comment to the video:

"wow - no idea what you're saying but sounds good..

isn't the finnish language descended from japanese? so you already have a big advantage there.. "

I had NO IDEA Finnish was descended from Japanese! That is amazing. I wonder how that happened. The mind boggles. ROFLMAO.

Shirow66 Wrote:Someone posted this as a comment to the video:

"wow - no idea what you're saying but sounds good..

isn't the finnish language descended from japanese? so you already have a big advantage there.. "

I had NO IDEA Finnish was descended from Japanese! That is amazing. I wonder how that happened. The mind boggles. ROFLMAO.

I believe that they are both dialects of Esperanto.

Finnish didn't descend from Japanese. However, their similar grammar and style has been noted by several scientists. A popular theory is that both Finnish and Japanese originally comes from the Ural mountains and the people there split, some went west and became finnish, some went east and became Japanese.

Is it true? Who knows. Finnish is very different from most European languages though and is not indo-european, it IS uralic. Japanese isn't considered uralic officially, but I'd say the theory has merits.

I used to think 'suomi' was a Japanese word. ;p

erlog Wrote:The best advice I can give anyone is to stop thinking about studying so much, and do the actual studying. Read stuff, listen to stuff, look things up, and ask questions. That's all you need to do. Now, get to it. Don't get discouraged. It does take time, but you should be able to see yourself improve by leaps and bounds.

^
More people need to listen to you^^

To reinforce the concept here, I learned English by watching plenty of television, ESPECIALLY a few Barney videos that I kept watching over and over. (I now remember that I did watch them a lot!) Of course, not only did I like having the closed captions on (since I liked reading), but I also ended up practicing reading with some things (like casual reading/viewing of the Multimedia stuff of an Encarta 98 CD encyclopedia).

Of course, I should say that I was (and am) rather advanced; the teachers at the 2-year-old-people school discovered my knowledge of English, and I knew how to read at the age of 3. Even so, now I feel so comfortable with English to the point of preferring English over Spanish and even mentally correcting others' grammar/spelling mistakes (especially the "draws" mistake#). (Usually, Puerto Ricans prefer Spanish, and their rudementary English sound very much like Spanish!)

So, what I did when I was young was the same thing she did in the video.



# = In Spanish, "dibujo" can be both a noun ("drawing") and a verb ("draw"), hence I see Hispanic people (I mean those who speak Spanish) saying "my draws" when they actually meant "my drawings." (I mean no offense, but such still annoys me some.)

This girl is even more awesome!

That's good. Those speaking skills are amazing.

That kerokerorin813 is pretty impressive. Great pronunciation.

Yeah, I just watched kerokerorin813, and she's been studying for what, 5 or 6 years? I don't remember. Anyway, I didn't watch the entire thing of the OP's video, but I enjoyed kerokerorin813's a lot more.

She's quite..."fluid." I guess it could be the difference between ぺらぺら and 上手. I'd say she's probably very 上手.

I like to watch videos like these, not necessarily to say "i'm better" or "i'm worse" than other people, but just to see where my level is.

The sounds of Japanese are a subset of the sounds of English. Except for a few sounds like kya, gya, kyo, gyo, kyu, gyu, nya, nyo, nyu, etc... Most of these are not too hard to say for an English speaker but these sounds that start with "g" are a little difficult.

She is pretty fluid, but she is obviously trying to speak faster than she is capable of, hence the extreme use of space fillers (eeto etc) and why she keeps pausing and correcting herself. I didn't watch the whole video but the beginning was especially awful, though she calms down later on. She also needs to work on her katakana pronunciation (sounds like English).

That said she is definitely better than most western women I've met (for some reason most upper level people I've met are Chinese/Korean women, or white men).

jcdietz03 Wrote:The sounds of Japanese are a subset of the sounds of English. Except for a few sounds like kya, gya, kyo, gyo, kyu, gyu, nya, nyo, nyu, etc... Most of these are not too hard to say for an English speaker but these sounds that start with "g" are a little difficult.

Mostly true, but that doesn't mean that English speakers can use them effectively. Japanese's つ、し、ラ行、ん、ふ、ち、が(when nasalized) all cause problems for English native speakers. Tsu and Fu don't exist in English (yes we have tsunami but most just pronounce it sunami). We have nasalized が (well, the onset anyways), but only in -ing so natives don't know how to use it naturally at the beginning or middle of a word. We have ラ行 ('s onset), but only in cases where a flap is produced like "ladder" and again not at the beginning of a word. ん、ち、し are mostly ruined by use of romaji to learn the kana. Ex: ん is nasalized and is not the English "n".

Many English speakers also have great difficulty with getting Japanese vowels right. (They are similar but not the same as English vowels. They are also not as open to change as vowels in English). Then you have the whole pitch accent issue and the fact that many beginners keep using English stress accent in Japanese.

I guess the main difficulty is vowels. They play much more important role than consonants in Japanese. And also the importance that Japanese attribute to vowels makes it difficult for them to appreciate consonants in Western languages. That`s why they have hard time to distinguish between "r" and "l", or "b" and "v" and so on.

imo, long vowels, consonants, voiced sounds, pitch cannot be mastered (or even understood) without first getting vowels あいうえお　right.

a couple of general observations about pronounciation:
It should feel like sounds are focused at the front of the mouth (I don't really no how to describe this)
The kana that are thought of as exceptions to the rule by english speakers (し、ち、つ、ふ) aren't considered exceptions by Japanese people. Indeed my students frequently romanise し as 'si', ち as 'ti', つ as 'tu' and ふ as 'hu' despite getting taugh 'proper' rominisation in English class. Japanese tend to think of these as having the same consonant sound as the other kana in each row. This means the position of the tongue should be the same for each kana within any row of the kana chart.
The tongue should sit fairly static and kind of low in the mouth with the tip resting behind the lower front teeth except for ラ行.
Basically there should be less movement of the tongue and lips, meaning consonants are not enunciated as clearly as in English.

The japanese vowels are approximately as follow(i'm australian for what it's worth):
あ　cUt not cAt or cAR or fAther
い　kind of half way between shIp and shEEp
う pUt (as in placing an object not golf) with a bit pOO mixed in
え　bEd
お bOdy (pronounced the brittish/aussie way not american way)
These aren't perfect but I believe this will get you 90% of the way, then once you're finished thinking in terms of romaji your vowels slowly get more accurate with increased exposure.
I don't know why so many textbooks get the vowels so terribly wrong.