Thanks again for the great tips Magamo. You are a very patient teacher.

The Japanese /CH/

1. Its tongue shape is alveolo-palatal, which means that the tongue is convex V-shaped, with the middle of the tongue highly bowed (and raised) towards the hard palate, producing strong palatalization (often most audible as a y-like transition after the sound).

2. Its place of passive articulation is postalveolar, meaning that the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the area behind the alveolar ridge (the gum line).

3. Its place of active articulation is laminal, meaning that it is the tongue blade that contacts the roof of the mouth.

**

NOTE: Never is mentioned that lips are rounded.

***

My summary:

1. How do you convex your tongue in a V-shape? also is palatalized, i.e., the middle of the tongue is raised against the hard palate, which is not hard to do, is the same place of articulation of /j/ the English yod.

2. Postalveolar means, behind the alveolar ridge, the same place as in the English version.

3. Ok that's easy, laminal means you use the blade of the tongue (just like in the English version).

**

Finally, the English /ch/ actually has, according to Wikipedia, stronger palatalization, which backs up the idea that the Japanese version of this phoneme is softer.

By placing one finger at the hard palate I notice how the middle of the tongue presses against it when doing the English /ch, maybe you could try the same while doing the Japanese /ch/ and tell me your results.


I wonder how an alien language with vocal characteristics similar to humans would sound if one imagines this life form to have, say, two tongues or a wider vocal tract.

bcrAn Wrote:By placing one finger at the hard palate I notice how the middle of the tongue presses against it when doing the English /ch, maybe you could try the same while doing the Japanese /ch/ and tell me your results.

It seems the tongue presses against a certain area of the hard palate when doing my English ch while my Japanese ch makes my tongue touches a wider area including the area for my English version.

bcrAn Wrote:As for this video (

) , is that a joke? I hear the same thing. Indeed, there is a difference in that one is a bit more soft than the other, but is that enough to be classified as a different phoneme?

My girlfriend speaks Croatian and there is indeed a difference when she says it, but it's nearly impossible for me to pronounce it right. It's the same when it comes to Korean ᄌ, ᄍ and ᄎ. She hears and says them right, but I don't.

bcrAn Wrote:Finally, the English /ch/ actually has, according to Wikipedia, stronger palatalization, which backs up the idea that the Japanese version of this phoneme is softer.

Interesting. In Russian phonology it is considered that stronger palatalization makes the sound softer, not harder. In fact the word "soft" is frequently used as a synonym for "palatalized". But then again, Russian uses the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate as its /ch/ sound, like Japanese, and it is one of the few Russian palatalized consonants that don't have a non-palatalized equivalent, so the degrees of palatalization don't matter in this case.

Btw, this is turning out to be harder than Arabic epiglottal sounds, in which at least you know what's going on, training your throat muscles is another story though.

bcrAn Wrote:Thanks again for the great tips Magamo. You are a very patient teacher.

The Japanese /CH/

1. Its tongue shape is alveolo-palatal, which means that the tongue is convex V-shaped, with the middle of the tongue highly bowed (and raised) towards the hard palate, producing strong palatalization (often most audible as a y-like transition after the sound).

2. Its place of passive articulation is postalveolar, meaning that the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the area behind the alveolar ridge (the gum line).

3. Its place of active articulation is laminal, meaning that it is the tongue blade that contacts the roof of the mouth.

No wonder you are confused -- you are describing the English sound, not the Japanese one. Please refer to my first post in this thread.

magamoI think some native speakers including me sometimes use /tʃ/ as in the initial "ch" of「チェッ！　上手くいったと思ったのに。」. The closer it gets to English /tʃ/, the more emotional it sounds. Also, I feel it tends to shift to /tʃ/ more often when it's followed by vowel う, especially when the speaker is putting stronger emotion.

Also, I know Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, but [url=http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%84%A1%E5%A3%B0%E5%BE%8C%E9%83%A8%E6%AD%AF%E8%8C%8E%E7%A0%B4%E6%93%A6%E9%9F%B3 Wrote:the Japanese page of [tʃ][/url] says:
日本語の「ち」や「ちゃ」行の子音は、話者によって異なるが、標準的な発音は 無声歯茎硬口蓋破擦音 [ʨ] のほうである。
i.e., Japanese Wikipedia says some speakers do use /tʃ/, albeit they're not the majority. This definitely matches my intuition.

Are you sure you never heard /tʃ/ used by native Japanese speakers in natural conversation? I think I hard it many many times in my life.

Since you are a native speaker and I'm not, I'm not going to argue with you. Maybe /tʃ/ is used by some people -- maybe in some dialects? -- but I think we both agree that it's not standard. However, I can confirm that I've never noticed /tʃ/ used by Japanese speakers. I will pay close attention from now on though. In my experience, though, languages either have tʃ or ʨ -- they don't go back and forth and don't usually have both as allophones.

By the way, hard and soft are very subjective terms. They mean nothing in phonology, except when, in a given language, 2 sounds are distinguished that way out of convention.

The only difference between the English and Japanese sounds is the part of the tongue that makes contact with the alveolar ridge. It so happens the English sound tends to be rounded, but it's incidental.

Thanks AlexandreC, but I am in fact talking about the Japanese /ch/ as described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_a..._affricate

Btw, you said that difference is in the "part of the tongue that makes contact with the alveolar ridge".

What would that be according to you? (it seems Wikipedia can't be fully trusted on this one).

bcrAn Wrote:Thanks AlexandreC, but I am in fact talking about the Japanese /ch/ as described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_a..._affricate

Btw, you said that difference is in the "part of the tongue that makes contact with the alveolar ridge".

What would that be according to you? (it seems Wikipedia can't be fully trusted on this one).

That description is odd. To me, this sounds like a palatal sound, not alveolo-palatal. Certainly, "convex V-shaped" is a weird thing to say about a tongue position that barely requires it be raised to touch the first thing it comes into contact with.

EDIT: Mind you, the tongue is pretty much in a "convex V-shape" in its relaxed, default position. It's a misleading wording, I think.

Well, today I asked 3 different and random Japanese people at the school and not only they were unaware of the 'difference' but also they thought my /ch/ was perfect. I am still not satisfied but I will take it easy now knowing that is not a big deal.

Yeah, I've never thought of this as one of the sound differences you really need to pay that much attention to, although I remember it being mentioned in class. We concentrated a lot on getting devoicing right (I remember the　しつ in 失礼します being really hard at first), the ふ sound, the Japanese r, not letting so much air escape from your mouth when making a t sounds, and a couple of others. But, we were told that with these two sounds, as well as things like the nasal 'g', you could get by well without paying too much attention to them (with the 'g' just because some Japanese speakers use a hard 'g' anyway).

I think a lot of the subtle differences in consonant pronunciation between japanese and English start to fall in place with correct tongue positioning. In english, the tip of the tongue (or thereabouts) is very active, and a lot of consonant sounds are coming from the front of the mouth by contact between the tongue tip and the teeth, alveolar ridge etc. In Japanese, the tongue tip doesn't move much from it's default position behind just behind the lower front teeth. Try making the a 'ch' sound while keeping the tongue tip static behind the lower front teeth, and your tongue should automatically arch up and forward so that it contacts the top of the roof of the mouth, and you'll make the japanese 'ch' sound.

Correct me if I am wrong, but before this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_b..._fricative) I was all fussed about the ふ sound, but now I think it's simply a bilabial /f/ and that's all.

bcrAn Wrote:Correct me if I am wrong, but before this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_b..._fricative) I was all fussed about the ふ sound, but now I think it's simply a bilabial /f/ and that's all.

Sure it's only a bilabial fricative, but there's no biliabial fricative in English, so it's not that simple to get used to for most people. It's not just about making the sound, it's about making it consistently. Just like Japanese people struggle to get f and v right when it's really not that hard a sound to make. n and m are easy to distinguish, but it's hard for Japanese to separate the 2 at the end of words. There is a huge difference between making a sound and being consistent at it.

bcrAn Wrote:Correct me if I am wrong, but before this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_b..._fricative) I was all fussed about the ふ sound, but now I think it's simply a bilabial /f/ and that's all.

Technically the consonant of ふ is ɸ, which is roughly the same sound as the noise you make when you blow out a candle or blow on hot food. This is not the same as f in English unless you blow out candles on your birthday case like ffffffffffffff.

は, へ, and ほ use the same h as the one you use for many English words with the letter h. If you're in doubt, since you have Japanese friends, ask them to do the は〜 thing that Japanese do to warm hands in Winter. They'll say h and only the consonant without any vowel.

ひ is ç, which is pretty much the same as the allophone of English h for words such as "hue," human," and "he". The English ç sounds slightly less y-ish than the Japanese equivalent to my ear. But the difference is very subtle, and I wouldn't be surprised if some Japanese use exactly the same ç as the English one and vica versa.

As for ch, if you didn't notice, the Croatian guy in the linked video is using a sound which kind of fall somewhere between Japanese [tɕ] and English [tʃ] in a sense. I'm not sure which category his hard and soft "c"s belong to, but they're neither full-fledged extreme Japanese [tɕ] or very dark English [tʃ]. Most likely his dialect doesn't differentiate between the two as different phonemes so he probably treats them as allophones of the same phoneme at best. I don't know what native Croatian speakers whose dialects have them as different phonemes would think of his hard and soft "c"s, but the difference in his pronunciation isn't as large as English vs. Japanese "ch"s, at least to my ear.

If you want your consonants to be more like native Japanese speakers', a good rule of thumb is that you don't make them as punchy as you do in English. Japanese consonants tend to require less lip movements etc. even if they're classified as exactly the same sound in IPA, e.g., the difference between Japanese and English "m"s. Also, it seems the transition sound between the consonant and vowel in a mora is quite important in Japanese. If you don't know what a mora is, it's roughly the same as a syllable in most cases. So it might be a good idea to focus more on how you smoothly transition from a consonant to the following vowel. In fact, the idea of "consonant" is quite hard for native Japanese speakers to grasp intuitively because mentally the minimum sound unit is a mora, which can't be divided into smaller pieces. These are just my observations, but I hear the same thing time and again from Japanese learners of English. So apparently it's not just me thinking this way.

[Edit] I googled pronunciation of the Croatian language and found examples of /tɕ/ and /tʃ/ by a native speaker whose dialect differentiates between the two:
tɕ, i.e., similar to the Japanese ch
tʃ, i.e., similar to the English ch
There are Croatian twists in pronunciation for obvious reasons, but maybe you can hear the difference more clearly in this pair than in the video. In any case, since you're living in Nagoya, there is no better example than the real "ch"s you hear from native Japanese speakers everyday, I think. Maybe turning on your TV is much better than listening to the examples on Wikipedia or whatever which may be true to the IPA definition but slightly off from the actual Japanese sound.

Great advice magamo, thanks again for taking the time to post your comments here. I have always blown my candles out in Japanese by the way

I need to look more closely into what you are saying about moras and the transition sound between consonants and vowels in Japanese.

EDIT: Yeah I can hear a subtle difference in the provided sample, one sounds softer than the other basically.

I occurred to me yesterday in talking with a Japanese friend that the difference is more obvious when the sounds are voiced, eg. Jeep vs. ジープ.

The English one sounds more voiced (does that make sense to people?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pala..._affricate
VS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alve..._affricate

They still sound very similar though.

じ and ぢ are the same phoneme and there is no difference in pronunciation between them. But they aren't always the voiced ち. In other words, it isn't always d͡ʑ. じ/ぢ can be realized as either d͡ʑ, ʑ, d͡ʒ, or ʒ. The latter two are "j" in "jump" and "s" (or s + one vowel letter) in "pleasure" and "vision" respectively, though the Japanese versions are closer to d͡ʑ and ʑ (i.e., the English sounds and the latter two Japanese sounds may both fall into the same categories ( d͡ʒ and ʒ) in the IPA sense, but, for example, English and Japanese ʒ are slightly different in that the latter is more like ʑ).

There are general rules for when to use which. But, to be honest, I wouldn't hear it as a foreign accent if you mix them up as long as your pronunciation is always close enough to one of the four versions (and everything else in your Japanese including grammar etc. is almost perfect). In fact, the actual realization of this sound is different from dialect to dialect. I'm not sure if I would notice if you use the wrong sound in conversation either.

If you really want to acquire a genuine native accent, a good rule of thumb is that you use d͡ʑ for when you intuitively think it's a grammatical boundary such as the beginning of a word and ʑ when you think it's an in-between sound in the grammatical sense. Grammar here has nothing to do with the kind of grammar you learn from textbooks or taught in class. It is how you feel subconsciously, so it requires a real good intuition languagewise which is comparable with native speakers'. It's ok to use only two versions; they're transcribed by four versions simply because actual sounds kind of fall somewhere between the sound classes defined by IPA. It's just some speakers' pronunciation sounds like d͡ʑ and others use a sound a little more like d͡ʒ, and the same goes for ʑ vs. ʒ, so if you forget about where they belong in the IPA system, native speakers are simply using two types of sounds: type d͡ʑ/ d͡ʒ and type ʑ/ʒ.

Note that native speakers typically use only one of the two types when speaking slowly or pronouncing one word as an example because each sound is almost always subconsciously treated as a grammatical boundary if you talk that way. So teaching materials where speakers enunciate each mora carefully and speak slowly are pretty much useless if you want to acquire natural sounding Japanese to this extreme.

Another thing you might want to consider is that English treats the two types in one Japanese phoneme as two different phonemes. This means that you will hear the difference between the two types "too clearly." For example, if you're used to the teacher-talk I just mentioned, your brain would always expect one exact same sound for じ/ぢ. But in reality there are two sounds, which native Japanese speakers find indistinguishably similar but native English speakers think of clearly different. So if you can understand your teacher or friends who talk to you slowly because you're a foreigner, you might still be thrown off by real conversation at natural speed. Think of a poor English learner whose teacher always pronounced t with the typical sound regardless of its position. He goes to America and gets struck with bedder, tweny, bu', and chree when he expects beTTer, twenTy, buT, and Tree. He says his teacher taught him nonsense, and he never knows "nonsense" often gets "t" and is kind of pronounced "nonsents" in quick speech.

Man... threads like this are why i love this forum...

Welcome back magamo!

bcrAn Wrote:The English one sounds more voiced (does that make sense to people?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pala..._affricate
VS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alve..._affricate

They still sound very similar though.

I'm also trying to work this out, for Chinese, where the difference is more important. So thanks for the thread. Maybe also have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolo-palatal_consonant and linked topics there, especially:

Wikipedia Wrote:In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (or alveopalatal) consonants are palatalized postalveolar fricatives, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate. They are similar to palato-alveolar and retroflex fricatives, but are laminal rather than apical or sub-apical as the retroflex fricatives are, and are more fully palatalized than the "domed" palato-alveolar fricatives are.

But still I am uncertain exactly how to position my tongue in the right way (can't seem to find two contrasting images), and to hear the difference. I guess it'll come with time from listening.

KanjiDevourer Wrote:But still I am uncertain exactly how to position my tongue in the right way

In Japanese, your tongue touches the base of your teeth.

In English, it's pulled further back so it doesn't touch the teeth. It makes the sound from the palate.

Now try explaining that to a Greek. In Greek, we don't even have the sound at all. The closest we have is /ts/.

BTW Does anyone know about Italian? It feels like it's about half way between, but if anyone has more information I'd like to hear it.

Raichu Wrote:BTW Does anyone know about Italian? It feels like it's about half way between, but if anyone has more information I'd like to hear it.

According to Wikipedia it's t͡ʃ (the English one).

I just had a chance to have my mom and brother listen to t͡ʃ and t͡ɕ and hear how they pronounce ち and such in real conversation in person. They're completely monolingual and only speak the Osaka dialect.

Mom could barely hear the difference when they were presented as isolated sounds, and didn't even notice when I switched the two sounds back and forth in conversation. She doesn't seem to use t͡ʃ herself in any phonological situations either.

But my brother spotted the difference right away when I had him listen to the example sounds on wikipedia and was able to tell which one is the normal Japanese sound. He was able to pronounce both t͡ʃ and t͡ɕ correctly too. An interesting thing is that he gave examples where some native Japanese speakers would use t͡ʃ. I'd also use the version of the sound in his examples. He didn't think this was regional or particularly nonstandard, and I don't either. Interestingly though, when I had my mom say those example sentences, she used the normal Japanese t͡ɕ.

So, it seems at least some native Japanese speakers of the Osaka dialect (and probably of other major dialects too) use t͡ʃ in certain rare phonological contexts while some never do. And, to people like me and my brother who use both, they sound similar but different while they sound exactly the same to those who only use t͡ɕ.

My brother said it'd be strange to use t͡ʃ all the time but that alone wouldn't make you sound foreign. And my mom wouldn't notice if you get it wrong unless you screw up the preceding and/or following sounds too.