Hi,

I know there have been questions asked before about the pronunciation of the は particle but is there anywhere can i go to find out and confirm these pronunciations?

E.g. I came across または in use to mean 'or' and looked it up on yahoodic.

http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8...=0&dtype=3

My instinct is that it is pronounced as わ here as it's somehow referring to また as a topic (is it? tell me otherwise! lol) but as it is completely new to me im having difficulties in making sure of it. Any tips?

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?1C When in doubt, use the audio here. (Click the blue button to the left of search results.) Well, not just when in doubt, I use it all the time. ;p

I was about to recommend WWWJDIC, but nest0r beat me to it.

And yes, you were right. The 「は」 in 「または」 is pronounced as 「わ」.

If you're often confused as to whether to read 「は」 as 「は」 or as 「わ」, maybe try mining stuff with audio for a while until it becomes a little easier.

sweet, thanks a lot for the very fast replies

johnlugh Wrote:I know there have been questions asked before about the pronunciation of the は particle but is there anywhere can i go to find out and confirm these pronunciations?

I'm not sure if its just a badly constructed question, but if its not, then to make things clear: the は particle will always be pronounced "wa", this never changes. However, the は obviously also gets used in a lot of words, where it is always pronounced as it should be, aka "ha". So the problem isn't really not knowing the pronunciation, but being able to differentiate the particles from the words.

And to that I can only say, exposure to Japanese will solve this relatively fast. Once you've listened / read / studied a bit of it you will naturally be able to divide all the words and particles in a sentence. I find myself able to do this even with sentences which contain a lot of unknown words now without really any problem