LoL
I kinda wondered that too!

I don't know how I can put this but while he staggers here and there,as he himself said it, he's 「外人っぽくない。」. I guess it puts him in デーブスペクター realm on 外人っぽくない scale, though デーブ's Japanese is really superb in other areas. He's this guys if anybody don't know.

Nukemarine Wrote:

Smackle Wrote:

Nukemarine Wrote:Wonder if I should try posting me singing "明日晴れるかな". There is that karaoke site that has 15000 songs.

Kind of late, but you should definitely try singing that song. We should all sing that song for fun to see our Japanese singing voices.

Why is it late? Here you go, but it's not good. My computer is not a karaoke machine.

http://www.snapvine.com/sb/3d9e377e0ed51...30485c72b4

Hey, you have to sing more foreign when you sing 桑田 songs :p really though, your え sounds more like E and あい more like I, but you sound pretty authentic.

masaman Wrote:I don't know how I can put this but while he staggers here and there,as he himself said it, he's 「外人っぽくない。」. I guess it puts him in デーブスペクター realm on 外人っぽくない scale, though デーブ's Japanese is really superb in other areas. He's this guys if anybody don't know.

Gahh that guy annoys me so much, and I don't even know why.. Everytime I turn on Japanese TV he's there!! He even turned up in some stupid movie I was watching.

oops, it was not a great example

Sorry this is a bit of a necropost, but I've got a 2 minute speech to deliver for my Japanese class and I was wondering whether anyone could give me some pointers on pronunciation. I've only been learning Japanese for ~2 months so I'm sure it sounds awful, but any and all criticisms will be welcome.

Link is here: http://www.snapvine.com/sb/a18fd05648e31...30485c71d2

The text underneath is the dialogue for my speech. PS. Any corrections for the text itself are also welcome (although I got a Japanese friend to check it, and lang8 so it should be mostly ok).

EDIT: Oh except I say クラス instead of　授業 because I keep stumbling over it.

Thanks!

The positive:

You don't sound very gaijin-like. For your level of Japanese in terms of grammar and vocab, your pron is good.

Nitpicking:

The biggest issue is your intonation. The tone of your voice is going up and down a lot, like we do in English. Generally you don't do this in Japanese unless you are speaking emotively. In particular you finish a lot of sentences with your tone going down a lot, much like we do in English. You also lilt (hope that's the right word) your voice sometimes mid sentence or at the end of the sentence when there is further related information coming, much like we do in English. EG.

授業の後、時々、友達と図書館へ行って勉強します。(masu here has a rising tone. this is an English device)

Other stuff, you want to keep your mouth tighter and try and talk more like a robot. Try watching someone speaking Japanese, they barely open their mouths. You want to try and copy this.

Be careful of over pronouncing particles. Usually they are less pronounced than the rest of the sentence.

Your pronunciation of クラス sounds like crasu. It needs to be ku ra su, said in succession. Be careful of letting the first two sounds become one like we do in English. Also be careful of the らりるれろ sounds become to like the English R. You want your tongue to tough the top of your mouth.

Anyway, don't worry too much. Just listen to lots of Japanese and you will naturally improve.

Thanks heaps! That was very helpful! I will work on keeping a more even tone and ku ra su. I've always had a really hard time with the らりるれろ its not really an l or an r and I'm still figuring out exactly how to say it.

Thankyou very much for your comments :-)

EDIT: Also regarding your point above about watching an actor's mouth: does anyone know some jdramas, movies, youtube clips or whatever that focus on the actor's mouths a lot? Anything with a lot of close ups on the actors faces/mouths would be great.

blackmacros Wrote:Sorry this is a bit of a necropost, but I've got a 2 minute speech to deliver for my Japanese class and I was wondering whether anyone could give me some pointers on pronunciation. I've only been learning Japanese for ~2 months so I'm sure it sounds awful, but any and all criticisms will be welcome.

Link is here: http://www.snapvine.com/sb/a18fd05648e31...30485c71d2

The text underneath is the dialogue for my speech. PS. Any corrections for the text itself are also welcome (although I got a Japanese friend to check it, and lang8 so it should be mostly ok).

EDIT: Oh except I say クラス instead of　授業 because I keep stumbling over it.

Thanks!

themal already summed it all up but I would pay more attention to the intonation like he said. Especially the last "私の日常生活は楽ですよ！". It is the closing statement, so I think you will give a very good impression if you get the intonation of this sentence perfect.

blackmacros Wrote:Sorry this is a bit of a necropost, but I've got a 2 minute speech to deliver for my Japanese class and I was wondering whether anyone could give me some pointers on pronunciation. I've only been learning Japanese for ~2 months so I'm sure it sounds awful, but any and all criticisms will be welcome.

Link is here: http://www.snapvine.com/sb/a18fd05648e31...30485c71d2

The text underneath is the dialogue for my speech. PS. Any corrections for the text itself are also welcome (although I got a Japanese friend to check it, and lang8 so it should be mostly ok).

EDIT: Oh except I say クラス instead of　授業 because I keep stumbling over it.

Thanks!

Nice speech, it was fun to listen to! Hearing non-natives speaking is always a big boost for my motivation level, so thanks for that
Your consonants are very Japanese, you've left a lot of English sounds in the dust, that's a pretty awesome step (one some speakers never even bother taking).

Pretty much what was said before was spot on so no rehashing. I'll focus on some words instead. あんまり the anma part is all one tone and then drops off on the り. かなり you should do your ｸﾗｽ thing to it too and make sure it's three distinct sylybales. It's kind of... pulesed on the (KANari) beginning part but doesn't fall off as much as あんまり.

Also I think that the sentence 自転車に来ると、 should be 自転車で来ると、 And jitensha sounds more like jittensha when you say it. Try making it all one flowing word that pulses in the middle on jiTENsha and make your "ji" flow from that sound right to your "t" without stopping the "ji" sound with your tounge before hand or moving it in an exaggerated way.

welldone101 Wrote:

blackmacros Wrote:Sorry this is a bit of a necropost, but I've got a 2 minute speech to deliver for my Japanese class and I was wondering whether anyone could give me some pointers on pronunciation. I've only been learning Japanese for ~2 months so I'm sure it sounds awful, but any and all criticisms will be welcome.

Link is here: http://www.snapvine.com/sb/a18fd05648e31...30485c71d2

The text underneath is the dialogue for my speech. PS. Any corrections for the text itself are also welcome (although I got a Japanese friend to check it, and lang8 so it should be mostly ok).

EDIT: Oh except I say クラス instead of　授業 because I keep stumbling over it.

Thanks!

Nice speech, it was fun to listen to! Hearing non-natives speaking is always a big boost for my motivation level, so thanks for that

Hehe, glad I could oblige

Thanks for all the helpful advice you guys! Unfortunately I did my speech yesterday so couldn't implement the most recent bits of advice. (PS: blegh, I got flustered and forgot a few lines here and there and I'm sure the pronunciation I worked on went *completely* out the door. Oh well). But I will definitely try to practice everything you guys have criticised :-)

Oh and as for 自転車に来ると、vs 自転車で来ると、my Japanese teacher said 来る is accompanied by に and not で, and my Japanese friend told me I should use に too. Except, somebody on lang-8 corrected me and said it should be で! On the other hand, my Japanese lecturer is actually Chinese and my Japanese friend left Japan at age 7 (and can't actually write as many Kanji as me, thanks to RtK - he can read them, though, and is of course way better than me at everything else). So, I really have no idea which is correct (or perhaps both?).

You do use に with 来る, when what is proceeding に describes the destination. Unless you "came to the bicycle", で is correct, because it describes the METHOD by which you came.

Jarvik7 Wrote:You do use に with 来る, when what is proceeding に describes the destination. Unless you "came to the bicycle", で is correct, because it describes the METHOD by which you came.

Ah, thanks for the clarification :-) That makes sense (as に usually goes together with a destination), but I am positive my teacher told us that 来る is an exception to the で rule.

She said something about 自転車で大学へ行きます=ok, but if you use 来る like 自転車に乗るに....ah shit I realise where I'm getting confused now. I got mixed up with 乗る／来る. Oops! Doesn't explain why my Japanese friend told me to use に though. I guess he was just wrong?

Maybe he didn't have enough context and thought that you were trying to say "came to the bicycle".

乗る is indeed a bit special here, compared to 来る.
電車で来る - He'll come by train
電車に乗って来る - He'll come riding IN a train

In both sentences, 電車 is the method of transportation, the difference is that you don't actually ride (noru) BY a train, but you do come BY the train. That's why に is used with noru and not with kuru.

Tobberoth Wrote:乗る is indeed a bit special here, compared to 来る.
電車で来る - He'll come by train
電車に乗って来る - He'll come riding IN a train

In both sentences, 電車 is the method of transportation, the difference is that you don't actually ride (noru) BY a train, but you do come BY the train. That's why に is used with noru and not with kuru.

Yes thats what my teacher was telling me; I guess I just somehow confused myself with 乗る／来る. There was another word this applied to aswell I think, but I can't remember it at the moment.

EDIT: Or maybe my Japanese friend *did* tell me to write 自転車に乗ると、and I accidentally wrote down 来ると、and that is what caused my later confusion.

Hi,

I'm new to this forum and just listened to other members' Japanese posted in this thread. Obviously everyone in here is pretty good at pronunciation, and sometimes some of posters sounded like native Japanese speakers. I was wondering how you learned the differences in phonemes/intonation/whatever between Japanese and your mother tongues. Is there a good website or a recommended book for this kind of thing? You seem to know a lot about Japanese sounds.

Sorry if I'm asking in the wrong place or the question was already answered. I'd like to learn the differences between Japanese and English phonetics to reduce my accent.

Thanks.

Just listen to loads of Japanese =D

bombpersons Wrote:Just listen to loads of Japanese =D

Is that it?! Actually I'm impressed by members of this forum and the AJATT guy when I listened to their Japanese. Some posts in this thread even talked about very subtle points to produce the right phonemes. Did you figure it out by just listening to Japanese? Oh my goodness...

Thank you. It seems I just have to listen more.

Can you post the transcript?

Overall you have great pronunciation. Some of the readings are not sounding quite as they should be, but in terms of stuff that English speakers usually struggle with you are excellent. In particular I like your intonation.

nitpicks:

公平 is sounding like kouwei. Be careful of the position your mouth is in after こう changing the へ sound into a "we" sound.

公平でないからです。- this で is sounding more like て

花や音楽 - this is sounding like はなよんがく

人間性　- coming out as ねんげんせい

度合い違う - you say 度合いが違う, or is this a issue with the transcript?

I made my own recording just to see how well I could do it (I like my pron of the individual words, but my intonation is a bit dodgy IMO. feedback welcome). Maybe it is useful to you. I also recorded it a million times. Snapvine won't let me upload so I put it on my webspace.

http://www.users.on.net/~zeech/nazenara.mp3

From listening to thermal's recording, he sounds Australian.

thermal, your voice sounds very pleasant to me though, and your accent only comes through here and there... nice.

Haha, yes I'm Australian (from Melbourne). Hope I can reach a level where a fellow aussie can't pick out my accent

Interesting to hear the real clip. There is a lot more emotion and expression which adds meaning.

Yeah 受ける is sounding like いける, nice pickup, I didn't notice that.

I think you are not so far, your pronunciation of the mora is good and this is the most important thing. Intonation is also good which is less important in terms of making them understand, but really important in terms of being enjoyable to listen to and expressing yourself.

The main problem you may face now is the stuff I pointed out probably won't be understood. English speakers in general and in particular people like us have a lot of experience dealing with broken English and off pron, but the Japanese don't. So you need to say each words reading correctly. Particular difficult can be differences between stuff like 聞いて/来て、病院（びょういん）／美容院（びよういん）, りょ／りょう.

There are also differences in pitch between words like 来て and 着て. When I was learning Japanese in class my teacher said to our mostly male and geeky class, "Your favorite anime character is naked, what do you want to say to her?" and we all tried to say 来て, but then the teacher said "Awww, now she is putting her clothes on.." haha. but anyway in reality they are rarely an issue. I think you will get there in the end with exposure anyway so I wouldn't worry about these too much.

Also, I don't know about you, but I find reading aloud really hard. I can speak much better when I speak off the top of my head. Not sure if you are getting much speaking practice, but you can probably do it better when not dictating.

I think you will get there with SRSing and exposure. Other stuff I find good is shadowing audio stuff in my SRS and doing dictation. Another thing I have been trying recently is listening to the same audio over and over. You learn to pick out all the nuances of it which should help with your pron in turn. It is one of 5 steps from a Korean book on learning English, I'm going to do the rest when I get some time. Will post if it is good.

thermal Wrote:There are also differences in pitch between words like 来て and 着て. When I was learning Japanese in class my teacher said to our mostly male and geeky class, "Your favorite anime character is naked, what do you want to say to her?" and we all tried to say 来て, but then the teacher said "Awww, now she is putting her clothes on.." haha.

Could you please elaborate on what the difference in pitch is exactly? I'm interested

Not learning Korean actually. The books have been translated into Japanese. They are really interesting. The books are based on the learn language like a child concept but are much more detailed than AJATT which is more or less summed up in the name. They also boast better results, 6 months to 1 year depending on how good your first language is when you start. More info: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...n-japanese

I struggle in English too. I can either read aloud without understanding and do it well, or understand as I go and stumble here and there.

I'm not entirely sure on the difference. According to my teacher I was ok, so I am think I am doing it correctly, but anyway this is what I think.

来て starts middle and ends low, 着て starts middle-high and goes up a little bit.

Other common ones：

柿 (persimmon) カキ(oyster)
酒 (alcohol) 鮭 (salmon)

This is the main thing I got out of my study in a Japanese school in Japan. I never realised that every word has tones. They are very slight and it's stupid drilling to remember then, but they are the difference between some words with the same hiragana.