OzarM wrote:
yudantaiteki wrote:
But when I was studying I took the common assumption that if you can read the hiragana, you know how to pronounce Japanese, and that messed up my pronunciation for years.
Uh-oh, that sounds like what I've been doing.
How do you avoid this? (Or is it not possible without manually checking every individual word?)
Basically there are three things you can do -- read descriptions of the sounds (this doesn't mean in-depth technical linguistic articles, just basic descriptions), then listen for the differences, and have a native speaker correct your pronunciation. The last one is difficult because unless they are a trained teacher they won't necessarily do it right, either out of politeness or just ignorance of what they're supposed to be correcting.
I've been a TA for college-level Japanese for 6 years in a class system that focuses heavily on speaking at first, so I've seen a whole lot of beginning students, and of course I've had to struggle with the pronunciation myself. Putting aside pitch accent which is a whole separate debate, these are the mistakes that I usually see beginning native English speaking students make:
- The long/short vowel distinction, as we've been talking about in this thread
- Putting English stress on words instead of saying them with an even stress
- Pronouncing ふ the same as English "foo"
- The "whispered mora" or "silent vowel" -- most people know that you don't pronounce the -u on です or ます at the end, but if you try to pronounce the i vowel in 来て, it will almost always sound like 聞いて instead. 来てください vs. 聞いてください vs. 切ってください is a big problem for a lot of people, both listening and speaking.
- Using English-style intonation on questions (An English yes/no question rises in intonation throughout, whereas the Japanese ones have a dip at the end with the か)
And these are mistakes that not only the beginning students make, but I've heard these out of graduate students and even professors. I did all of these (and some of the beginner ones above) until I had to teach the pronunciation and then learned how to correct my own.
- Pronouncing ひ as English "he" (I can't explain how it's supposed to be pronounced, but the consonant in ひ is not the same as は, へ, and ほ)
- Being unable to pronounce the difference between (say) 記念（きねん） and 禁煙（きんえん）. ん in general is a big hangup for a lot of people because there are 4 (or is it 5?) different pronunciations of it depending on what comes after it. ん is often a nasalized vowel instead of a consonant -- if you're saying きんえん correctly, the tip of your tongue should not touch the roof of your mouth at all (the middle will for the k in き, but not the tip). It does touch for the n consonant in きねん or きんねん（近年）. Same thing with えんご（縁語） -- the "ng" part is like English "king" or "thing"; your tongue doesn't touch the roof of your mouth.
Another pronunciation-related problem people have is a refusal to pronounce loan words as Japanese rather than English. You must say コンピューター, not "computer". コンピューター is a Japanese word, and sticking an English word in the sentence instead of it is as wrong as it is with any other Japanese word. This isn't a problem with Japanese who are fluent in English, but if they're not, they will have trouble understanding the English word spoken in non-katakana pronunciation.
Of course you most likely will never get your pronunciation to sound like a native speaker (if you ever do, you're very lucky). And context will help a lot with pronunciation problems, but I think the work needed to fix some of these basic errors is not that great.
Whenever this comes up there's always someone who says "Don't bother studying that, just listen and everything will work itself out." All I can do is repeat my own personal experience -- I lived in Japan for 2 years, not in an English bubble, and I passed JLPT 1, and I still was not pronouncing ひ or ん correctly. Once I had my problem pointed out to me, I was able to hear that I was doing it wrong and fix it.
Last edited by yudantaiteki (2013 May 18, 9:07 pm)
