I was listening to some audio a while ago. I heard two similar words, 明ける and 空ける.

The first word was pronounced with more of a keh sound while the second sounded like more of a kay. It's strange, though. Now, as I repeat them over and over again they are slowly starting to sound more similar.

What could a possible cause for my initially hearing two very distinct sounds?

kazelee Wrote:What could a possible cause for my initially hearing two very distinct sounds?

You're still learning Japanese sound rules, so sometimes (probably pretty often) your brain uses English rules instead. These two competing systems can sometimes cause variations in pronunciation to be overemphasized. The solution is (as always) more input.

Of course, that's just my theory.

My experience is that eventually sounds start to merge together as my brain gets better at following Japanese. To give an English example: there is in fact a difference between the "t"s in "tiny," "start," and "tea," but English-speakers don't notice them. In the same way, when listening to Japanese, I eventually stop paying attention to the difference between the consonant sounds of せ and し and focus only on the vowels.

I haven't yet noticed this impacting my English. "Sea" and "she" are still distinct.

Isn't it a matter of pitch accent? I want to say that you'll end up with a-KE-ru in the first and A-KE-ru in the second, but I could be wrong. Maybe a-KE-RU in the first and A-ke-ru in the second? Bleh, I need more studying. ;p

Oops, think I'm subvocalising wrong because I keep thinking of 明るく.

nest0r Wrote:Isn't it a matter of pitch accent? I want to say that you'll end up with a-KE-ru in the first and A-KE-ru in the second, but I could be wrong. Maybe a-KE-RU in the first and A-ke-ru in the second? Bleh, I need more studying. ;p

Oops, think I'm subvocalising wrong because I keep thinking of 明るく.

No, 明ける and 空ける has the same accent, so that can't be it. I think it's just 気のせい.

wildweathel Wrote:You're still learning Japanese sound rules, so sometimes (probably pretty often) your brain uses English rules instead. These two competing systems can sometimes cause variations in pronunciation to be overemphasized. The solution is (as always) more input.

This. You are thinking of Japanese sounds in terms of English sounds. Just like L and R are the same sound to a Japanese person, and keh and kay are probably the same sound as well.

Likewise, to our English ears, tsu and su and dzu are all the same sound until we learn to distinguish them, and while we're learning to say them it could come out as any of them to Japanese ears.

Tobberoth Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Isn't it a matter of pitch accent? I want to say that you'll end up with a-KE-ru in the first and A-KE-ru in the second, but I could be wrong. Maybe a-KE-RU in the first and A-ke-ru in the second? Bleh, I need more studying. ;p

Oops, think I'm subvocalising wrong because I keep thinking of 明るく.

No, 明ける and 空ける has the same accent, so that can't be it. I think it's just 気のせい.

hehe. It is (I looked it up and saw that 'akeru' is 'unaccented'), but I kept hearing a-KE because I think of 明(るく) as a-KA-ru-ku (even if that's my imagination too).

wccrawford Wrote:This. You are thinking of Japanese sounds in terms of English sounds. Just like L and R are the same sound to a Japanese person, and keh and kay are probably the same sound as well.

Huh?

So you're saying that Japanese don't notice the subtleties between the eh and ay, and there's a chance my ear is just overanaylizing it?

Quote:hehe. It is (I looked it up and saw that 'akeru' is 'unaccented'), but I kept hearing a-KE because I think of 明(るく) as a-KA-ru-ku (even if that's my imagination too).

Where do you look up these accents? The few I know are only through exposure and a small wikipedia article.

kazelee Wrote:

wccrawford Wrote:This. You are thinking of Japanese sounds in terms of English sounds. Just like L and R are the same sound to a Japanese person, and keh and kay are probably the same sound as well.

Huh?

So you're saying that Japanese don't notice the subtleties between the eh and ay, and there's a chance my ear is just overanaylizing it?

Quote:hehe. It is (I looked it up and saw that 'akeru' is 'unaccented'), but I kept hearing a-KE because I think of 明(るく) as a-KA-ru-ku (even if that's my imagination too).

Where do you look up these accents? The few I know are only through exposure and a small wikipedia article.

Close listening and emulation. But now that I listen/repeat 明るく and its variations, I don't hear any pitch accents. I think I just wanted to hear them because 'pitch accents!' seemed like such a neat answer. ;p

Think I'll go back to what I was doing before. Ignoring notation/representations of 'pitch accent' in my mind, and just listening and repeating. When I try to step back mentally and form these theories about the sounds, I think it messes with my perception of them.

wccrawford Wrote:This. You are thinking of Japanese sounds in terms of English sounds. Just like L and R are the same sound to a Japanese person, and keh and kay are probably the same sound as well.

Is that really true? Or are they just mixing R and L up because they are falling back on Katakana pronunciations, and when they are speaking they can't remember whether ライス is rice or lice? R and L are very different sounds, I'm not really convinced that they can't hear the difference.

nest0r Wrote:Think I'll go back to what I was doing before. Ignoring notation/representations of 'pitch accent' in my mind, and just listening and repeating. When I try to step back mentally and form these theories about the sounds, I think it messes with my perception of them.

I think that's the best approach. Most languages have some sort of pitch accent, including English, but there's no notation of pitch in written English, and doing so would probably be misleading--just like Japanese pitch-accent dictionaries are misleading. Real-world Japanese doesn't conveniently consist of high-pitch and low-pitch syllables. Anyone can hear that.

Just stop worrying and learn it by ear.

Yukamina, し and ひ are very different sounds, but there was a time when I had a very hard time telling them apart. I'm sure there are plenty of non-native Japanese speakers who say 使徒（しと）when they mean 人（ひと）or vice-versa. I imagine the "lock," "rock;" "lice," "rice" minimal pairs are similar.

More than one Japanese native on this forum have emphasized that what makes a big difference to the Japanese ear is pitch rather than pronunciation. That is to say, they don't really care if you say it as "eh" or "ay" as they are the same letter for them. The same goes for all the other vocals, "R" and "L", etc.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I think what they're saying in linguistic terms is that what we would distinguish as eh and ay are allophones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

"Speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a distinctive sound in that language. An allophone is not distinctive, but rather a variant of a phoneme; changing the allophone won't change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native, or be unintelligible"

So if we use another example, the R and L thing. You might get your flap right and sound pretty native, or you might just say it with an English R or L like ARIGATO or ALIGATO and one of several things might happen: you'll be understood but you'll sound really foreign, or they might understand you from a combination of context and sound, or they might be like what the heck did you just say?

This page is pretty cool (ignoring the pink background that is) http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/lang/vowels.html

It lists languages with 3, 4, ..., 14 vowels in their "vowel system." Check out the 5 vowel system.

Quote:Latin and some dialects of Classical Greek immortalised this, and it in turn dictated the number of "vowel letters" in the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Spanish, Serbo-Croat, Hebrew, Japanese, Swahili, Maori, Hausa and Basque, to name but a few, are modern-day languages with CL. (In Japanese, /u/ is typically unrounded /w/, but this doesn't really matter here.)

I can't quite figure out where English fits in there since he has it divided up into "Australian English" "Scottish English" and so on.

This page says typical American English has about 15 vowels
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/Pho...start.html

So, no doubt what we would consider to be separate vowels would be allophones in Japanese.

yukamina Wrote:Is that really true? Or are they just mixing R and L up because they are falling back on Katakana pronunciations, and when they are speaking they can't remember whether ライス is rice or lice? R and L are very different sounds, I'm not really convinced that they can't hear the difference.

Try learning a language like Mandarin where there are 3 or 4 'sh' sounds and you'll swear there's no way the Chinese can hear the difference. But they can; the brain adapts itself to distinguishing sounds that are important to it (i.e, the sounds of your native language and your immediate environment). Monolingual speakers of Japanese really can't hear the difference between R and L, just like native monolingual speakers of English can't distinguish between Mandarin's 'sh' sounds, Japanese's long vowels, regular and sliding vowels in most languages, or ...

As an aside, this is probably the one true (only?) benefit of AJATT-style "listen to your target language 24/7, even if you don't understand it" philosophy. After a month you probably still wont understand it. But your brain will have adapted to hear the phonetics (you can then properly distinguish long and short vowels, hear and remember variations in pitch, know that R and L are the same sound, etc.) and starts to focus on the next step up, morphology.

mafried Wrote:native monolingual speakers of English can't distinguish between Mandarin's 'sh' sounds, Japanese's long vowels...

We can hear Japanese long vowels just fine if we are taught the correct short pronunciation. The difference between the two is different is not that hard to hear. (don't ever quote me on this, though )

I get what you are saying about Mandarin. I was looking at a clip on youtube about pronouciation in mandarin. It seemed as if they were just repeating the same sounds over and over. I was like WTF.

drivers99 Wrote:This page says typical American English has about 15 vowels

That's a lot of vowels! No wonder it's such a hellish language to learn.

mafried Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Is that really true? Or are they just mixing R and L up because they are falling back on Katakana pronunciations, and when they are speaking they can't remember whether ライス is rice or lice? R and L are very different sounds, I'm not really convinced that they can't hear the difference.

Try learning a language like Mandarin where there are 3 or 4 'sh' sounds and you'll swear there's no way the Chinese can hear the difference. But they can; the brain adapts itself to distinguishing sounds that are important to it (i.e, the sounds of your native language and your immediate environment). Monolingual speakers of Japanese really can't hear the difference between R and L, just like native monolingual speakers of English can't distinguish between Mandarin's 'sh' sounds, Japanese's long vowels, regular and sliding vowels in most languages, or ...

As an aside, this is probably the one true (only?) benefit of AJATT-style "listen to your target language 24/7, even if you don't understand it" philosophy. After a month you probably still wont understand it. But your brain will have adapted to hear the phonetics (you can then properly distinguish long and short vowels, hear and remember variations in pitch, know that R and L are the same sound, etc.) and starts to focus on the next step up, morphology.

Agreed. Learning the various s sounds, z sounds and c sounds takes quite a while in Mandarin.

kazelee Wrote:Where do you look up these accents? The few I know are only through exposure and a small wikipedia article.

A few places list pitch, http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ is one of them.

0 means flat (which actually means slowly rising), 1 means accent is on the first syllable (then drops), 2 means accent is on the second syllable (starts low, rises to it and then drops), and etc.

QuackingShoe Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:Where do you look up these accents? The few I know are only through exposure and a small wikipedia article.

A few places list pitch, http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ is one of them.

0 means flat (which actually means slowly rising), 1 means accent is on the first syllable (then drops), 2 means accent is on the second syllable (starts low, rises to it and then drops), and etc.

Thank youzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It seems like all has been said already, but yes, they have exactly the same sound and accent, actually I think they can actually be the same word (和語).

And Japanese natives often don't distinguish ay from eh. For example, 家計 can be pronounced かけい or かけー, though technically former is probably correct.

But けい and けー have 2 moras (2 ひらがな), and あける's け is one mora, so if you heard the difference, it was probably variations in け sound that Japanese people don't hear. They do perceive the difference between けい and けー, but they don't perceive the difference between the first part of (American) Ay and Eh.

Like nac_est said, pronunciation is often not very important in Japanese, or to be more precise, each Japanese phoneme has broader variations compared to most Western languages' so the difference you hear may be something Japanese people don't hear. You can pronounce 好きです as「すきです」 or 「sきです」 or 「すきでs」or 「sきでs」and nobody will notice the differences as long as your pitch and mora are correct.

なるほど

そうなんですよ。

I can say something useful once in a while