I'm having trouble understanding how romanization has anything to do with pronunciation, but I'm pretty sure that JimmySeal is right.  I've seen it done with two c's before, but I'm pretty sure that's non-standard.

To me, there's a bit more of a pause in the sound.  chya is un-voiced anyway, so there's going to be a stop, but the small tsu seems to extend that pause a tad.  Then the chya is done with more emphasis, or plosiveness.  Is that more what you were looking for, Mr. Hans?

CharleyGarrett wrote:

chya is un-voiced anyway, so there's going to be a stop, but the small tsu seems to extend that pause a tad.

ちゃ is not "unvoiced".

Japanese is a rhythmic language like Spanish. Spanish people are very good at pronouncing Japanese. Each syllable lasts one beat and the small tsu, which indicates silence, also lasts one beat. You can clap your hands in rhythm and say each syllable in turn. Like this:

o,ka,ne,na,ku,na,(pause),cha,(pause),te

Each time you clap your hands, you should say each syllable between each comma. For the pauses, you should clap your hands without saying anything. After you've done it slowly, speed it up about 10 times and that's how it should be pronounced.

The reason a double consonant is used for small tsu is because the sound it represents also occurs in English sentences where the same consonant is repeated. For example, "Hot tea". When you say, "Hot tea", you don't pronounce the "t" twice, you have a short pause and you pronounce it only once.

Although you will read ホット・ティー on menus, if you were to convert "Hot tea" into katakana in such a way that it represents as closely as possible the English pronunciation, then you would in fact write

ホッティー

Hope that makes sense.

Last edited by wrightak (2008 March 28, 9:15 am)

wrightak wrote:

The reason a double consonant is used for small tsu is because the sound it represents also occurs in English sentences where the same consonant is repeated. For example, "Hot tea". When you say, "Hot tea", you don't pronounce the "t" twice, you have a short pause and you pronounce it only once.

It isn't that the small tsu represents a pause.  It only seems like it does because the pause is the only way to double the length of a plosive consonant.  For doubled consonants that aren't plosives (like 'ss' and 'ssh') the small tsu is still used, but there is no pause, just a double-length sound.

Italian and Hungarian are two languages that do it the same, only it's easier for us to see the doubleness because they use the Latin alphabet.

MethodGT wrote:

For doubled consonants that aren't plosives (like 'ss' and 'ssh') the small tsu is still used, but there is no pause, just a double-length sound.

So am I correct in saying that for the word 雑誌　ざっし　zasshi, you don't think there's a pause? I always thought there was. I'll listen out today.

I suspect the concept of "pause" is simply an attempt to give a clear rule of pronunciation, since the English language (as other similar ones) is lacking one. There is no real difference between that and the "double consonant".
I'm thinking this because my native language, Italian, is full of double consonants, and the concept of pause is not used at all. Furthermore, the sound of "our" double consonants is identical to the sound given by the Japanese small つ.
I was aware that English speakers have difficuilty in pronouncing this kind of sound, because it's not really used in their language.

To give an example, the name "Condoleezza", besides being a misspelling of "Con dolcezza" (with sweetness), is usually pronounced "Con-doh-lee-za" (I don't know if I've written it correctly, but you know), while the Italian double z should be pronounced as a real double consonant. How can I explain it? Oh yes! Use something like a pause between "lee" and "za" .
(also the "ee" would be pronounced like an "eh" of double lenght, but that's beyond the point)

thanks for all your help, i got it now

I think a hard part of Japanese pronunciation is knowing when to devoice the vowels, like the u at the end of desu, and the i in shita.  Sometimes it seems like they are devoiced, and sometimes they aren't.  Is it random?  I've read that it happens when an i or u is found between two unvoiced consonants.  But it seems that it isn't always the case.

Also, when is the second word in a group voiced?  Like gana in 'hiragana', and jima in 'Iwo Jima'?  Why isn't it voiced in 'katakana'?  Are there any hard rules for that?

Oh, the page-of-papers I linked to also has some stuff about devoicing vowels. The 'corpus based analysis of vowel devoicing' paper describes it as "an event whose occurrence cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy"...

I once heard a Japanese woman talking on the phone (in a semi-formal context, to a travel agent or something) with a rather odd speech manner which involved not devoicing the 'u' in desu and masu. So some of it is stylistic, I guess.