Be careful giving this advice it doesn't sound right to me at all. I did a phonetics experiment on the pronunciation of Japanese and English words to tell the difference. In short yes the Japanese is between our R and L sounds which if you put your tongue on the top of your mouth exaggerated L on the teeth. And exaggerated R either made with the tip or blade of your tongue half way between is the Japanese position. The main point though in which determines if it sunds Japanese is actually the amount of time between when you let the air out of your mouth and the burst of sound that makes the letter. It's somewhere in the range of 60 milliseconds for the Japanese sound but there is no way you can adjust this. Our d is around 40 ms and r is 100 ms that's why the d sounds more like it. However we catogorize sunds into bins so we can say anything between say 30-55 ms is a D. Every language does the same. I imagine if you walk around saying the English D with a perfect English D pronunciation nobody will understand it because it may not fall in the range for the Japanese R sound.


Best to just practice with a Japanese teacher for pronunciation. They can just tell you yes that sounds better or that was shit and you need to keep track of the changes in your tongue so you can reproduce it.

With a teacher, it was pretty easy to learn the actual sound without substituting similar ones in English.  I'm sure if you look around a bit for good explanations of how to make the sound, and try imitating a recording as well as recording your own voice to check it, you could get the sound down without too much trouble.  Probably would only take a couple of hours total.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2012 October 04, 8:25 pm)

shinsen wrote:

I'll give you the best pronunciation hack ever. Forget about romaji. りょうり is neither ryouri nor dyoudi, it's just りょうり. Open your ears, listen and get used to it, that's all there is to it. Otherwise you'll end up like those Japanese people that say "foo" instead of "who" because they wrote it out in katakana as フー. Or "taburetto" instead of "tablet".

If you know how to pronounce Japanese, whether or not it's in romaji is irrelevant.  'りょうり' and 'ryouri' are both series of symbols which represent the same sounds.

Also, a structured approach to learning how to pronounce a new sound works better than just 'listening and getting used to it.'

Last edited by Tzadeck (2012 October 04, 9:02 pm)

Thanks a lot guys for the good input.

Listening and practicing helped me get to about 90% with pronunciation but over the years still made the same mistakes on those sounds.  With these hacks it's helped me a lot atleast in my language partners and jp friends view.  yea, the english symbols don't mean much but they help me to notice the issue.

It's kind of like I bet you know lots of fluent English speakers from japan but they still have a slightly weird accent and you know they are japanese as soon as they open their mouth.  Just trying to reduce that a little when I speak.  Certain words really stick out.

I guess it's not really a big deal though but still fun to try to change your accent.

Last edited by socrat (2012 October 04, 9:58 pm)

magamo wrote:

Japanese /r/ is known to include a very wide range of sounds, so it shouldn't be difficult to produce a sound good enough for the perceptual magnet effect to kick in on the native speaker's side. Besides, Japanese /r/ accepts tons of free allophones, meaning that you have various choices to pick as your own version of /r/ for Japanese. If your pronunciation doesn't quite sound like a native speaker's, there is a good chance that native speakers can't hear the difference between yours and theirs. So don't sweat over /r/ too much.

One thing that can easily trip you up is that the consonant for り is different from the one for ら, る, れ, and ろ. They're written in romaji as ra, ri, ru, re, and ro. But this is very misleading. The consonant for ri is the same as りゃ, りゅ, and りょ. So "ri" is more like "ryi" if you want it to logically represent its pronunciation.

The consonant for り, りゃ, りゅ, and りょ is simply a palatalized version of Japanese /r/. So if you prefer a systematic learning method, all you need to do is learn how to do palatalization, and that's it.

Makes sense.

With the english L, the tongue just touches the roof of the mouth, but with the D the tongue is firmly planted on the roof of the mouth. 

So perhaps adding a little D in there helps to learn how to plant the tongue and learn
the palatalized version.

When the objective is to produce a sound the way natives produce it, what can prossibly constitute a hack? There are no bypass or tricks involved and there is only one way (or a range of ways) to make a sound: you can either make the sound or you can't. But you can't pretend to make the sound or trick people into thinking you can.

At the end of this page (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/hiragana) there's explanations on the r sound and this link: http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishpron … cing_r.htm