Hi, I just have a question about pronunciation..

I have some children books in Japanese from when I was little and now that I'm learning Japanese I got them out for practice. I know a few things about how a little つ (which I don't know how to type) doubles the next sound.. and the しゃ　しょ sounds etc... but what I'm confused about is sounds like oi or ai..

ねずみ　の　おいしゃさま　is one of the books, something about doctor mouse I think?

Anyways... how you know if it's supposed to be pronounced Oh-i-sha-sama, or like.. Oi-sha-sama. Or like o-sha?

I'm mostly using these books just for hiragana/katakana recognition practice, so I make many pronunciation errors I'm sure, but I'd still like to learn the correct way to pronounce things before I get too many bad habits.

Oh, I have another question about books.

Well, right now I know very few Japanese words, but I wanted to get a "real" Japanese novel. Like, a short novel, something high school age that's not manga. The books stores I found online were hard to understand and most/all of the book summaries were in Japanese which I couldn't understand...

I love to read (mostly fiction) like James Patterson books (Maximum Ride ) Harry Potter, A Child Called It (not fiction), My Sister's Keeper, Lovely Bones etc.. As for a Japanese book, maybe something high school/middle school student would read, preferably a happy story, lol. So if anyone has some favorite Japanese books/book stores to recommend. I'd love to hear about them.

And well, I'm not any where near ready to be able to read them, but I thought it'd be nice have my goal in my hands to keep me motivated/something else to look forward to. ^_^

xAyakox Wrote:ねずみ　の　おいしやさま　is one of the books, something about doctor mouse I think?

I'm guessing that's おいしゃさま...

Quote:Anyways... how you know if it's supposed to be pronounced Oh-i-sha-sama, or like.. Oi-sha-sama. Or like o-sha?

I'm not sure how best to explain pronunciation, but I'm pretty sure you'll do enormously better by finding some resource or explanation that lets you *hear* the correct ways of pronouncing words rather than trying to get a text-only explanation from this forum...
The EDICT entry for おいしゃさん has an audio clip. (おいしゃさま hasn't been recorded yet), for instance. There may be better resources out there too.

Ah okay, tyvm I was looking everywhere to find a sound clip of it. That helped a lot.

and yeah, it's supposed to be a little ゃ (I just figured out how to do that.. lol)