Hi everyone!
I´ve finished the RTKana book, and have read a bit hiragana/katagana everyday since then. Now that I´ve started going through Tae Kim´s guide I feel a bit insecure, and I was wondering if it´s possible to sum up all the "beginner mistakes" one can do, while reading kana?

An example I struggle with:
べんきょうは、した。
Should the う sound like u or make the きょ sound longer?
Stuff like this makes me insecure, and quite frankly it sucks, because I want to focus on the grammar points / sentence, and not the kana.

Another example is は - I know it should be pronounces "wa" when used as a particle, so does this mean that I pronounce it "wa" everytime I see it written in hiragana, and "ha" when it´s a part of a kanji-reading?

Stuff like this is a bit hard to grasp for me... I know it´ll get better with time, but I was hoping that you guys could give me some helpful hints/tricks for kana-reading in my very, very early stage of sentence-mining!

You´re the best!!

Z

listen to a lot of japanese and you'll figure it out pretty quick. It's pronounced "wa" when used as a particle and "ha" when its used in a word. Read/listen to enough and you'll soon find you have no trouble spotting the difference.

Zorlee Wrote:An example I struggle with:
べんきょうは、した。
Should the う sound like u or make the きょ sound longer?

It extends the O sound in きょ.

Quote:Another example is は - I know it should be pronounces "wa" when used as a particle, so does this mean that I pronounce it "wa" everytime I see it written in hiragana, and "ha" when it´s a part of a kanji-reading?

は is only pronounced 'wa' when it's used as a particle. Some words are not written in kanji, so you'll just have to learn to identify the particle 'wa'.

Ditto with へ. It's only 'e' as a particle.

Within a single world, and excepting things subject to inflection, う is always a lengthener after お or う, and い is are always a lengthener after え or い. That distinction in the start is important just to point out that, for example, the てい in している is not a lengthened sound (two words), and neither is the う in おもう (う is inflectable).

yukamina Wrote:It extends the O sound in きょ.

I used to think so too, but when I asked my wife she said 'ou' in きょう is not just a long 'o' like キョー.

Honestly I'm not sure though because some books will say 'ou' is just a long 'o', but maybe for 標準日本語 it's more 'ou' than 'oo' ?

Check this example for きょうかしょ

http://smart.fm/items/matching?keyword=教科書

I would have said there's a 'u' in there.

Lengthened O's in Japanese generally get a u feeling at the end, especially if the word ends with it. Still, う in きょう is definitely a lengthener, just think of how the う sounds in おもう, it's completely different from how the う sounds in きょう.

I wouldnt say its just an extended O sound cos theres definately a u sound to it, its just subtle.

I knew you guys would get picky over that. You'll get a better feel for it(and the rest of Japanese pronunciation) with time and exposure.

mezbup Wrote:I wouldnt say its just an extended O sound cos theres definately a u sound to it, its just subtle.

Indeed. it's the same when い is a lengthener. せんせえ and せんせい are obviously not pronounced the same way. The い makes the え longer but there's still a subtle hint of i at the end.

Tobberoth Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:I wouldnt say its just an extended O sound cos theres definately a u sound to it, its just subtle.

Indeed. it's the same when い is a lengthener. せんせえ and せんせい are obviously not pronounced the same way. The い makes the え longer but there's still a subtle hint of i at the end.

I was actually surprised at how subtle the い sound in せんせい was when I really noticed it for the first time.

Thank you guys so much for the great answers!
I´ll try my best to improve my kana, hehe! =)

I have a (unrelated) kana question of my own ~

I learned the kana quite a while ago, but came to realize that the stroke orders were wrong on a few from the source I used (DS Japanese Coach). Now that I'm about done learning the kanji, I wanted to go back and make sure I learn the right way to write the kana.

But I'm running into some discrepancies between online resources...
(like the line on ヒ running left-to-right or right-to-left)

And some people are arguing that the source I used is correct, it's the 'newer' way of writing them, but I don't know that I buy that (especially since the maker admitted some of them were wrong). One reviewer listed a ton of Katakana as incorrect, but they don't seem out of order to me. But I might have re-learned them without knowing while learning the kanji....

So ~ where can I find the more accurate stroke order for the kana?

Or are there bound to be some variations, as writing evolves over time?
I don't really want to drill the order only to find out it is 'wrong' again.
Thanks!

Who cares? As long as the characters look good and correct and you write them fast enough, does it REALLY matter in which order you write them? Not every person writes latin letters the same way, it's the same with Japanese.

Does it really matter if they look the same??

I've heard arguments both ways, if it does matter or if it doesn't matter. But if I'm going to be writing these things over and over again I'd like to know I've learned the correct order in case it *does* matter one day. Like writing in the characters with handwriting recognition, or taking a class and the teacher cares about such things, I can' already think of a few reasons it might besides the generic 'stroke order is really important in Japanese!' argument.

Tobberoth Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:I wouldnt say its just an extended O sound cos theres definately a u sound to it, its just subtle.

Indeed. it's the same when い is a lengthener. せんせえ and せんせい are obviously not pronounced the same way. The い makes the え longer but there's still a subtle hint of i at the end.

*sigh* You see this discussion pop up every so often. The only reason why japanese people think it's not pronounced the same is purely because of visual reasons.

ou and ei = long o and long e respectively.
oo and ee = long o and long e respectively.
It's purely a spelling thing that came about because of historical reasons. Still you keep on finding people that argue that there's a difference.

There isn't, none, not any. The discussion doesn't even exist amongst linguists.

If there would be a distinction. We would want to see a lot more native words that have oo and ee.

oo is simply what is used if the word used to have: owo or oho (ohokii for example). ee is ONLY found in 'yes', it's pretty ridiculous to think that one single word has a unique sound to any other word in that language. There's only one other language that I can think of that has a unique sound in only one word of its language, and that is the pharyngealised l in 'allah' in Arabic. But obviously giving some bizarrely unique pronunciation to something that is considered divine is at least slightly more plausible than saying the word 'yes' has a unique pronunciation.

This is not to say that maybe some dialects have retained distinction between ou and oo, but we're all trying to learn standard japanese I take it right?

Sorry for the rant, but being a linguist, I weep every time I see people having this discussion.