I think the problem is down to pesky romaji, those characters are written in different ways depending on all manner of different things. Let alone how some person reads them.

There isn’t really an easy way to describe the pronunciation using roman alphabet because its not a sound that really exists, in the same way that らりるれろ is a mixture of r,l, and d sounds. You could use the phonetic alphabet… but no one wants that.

when a sound is written as dz, the sound you are looking to create is somewhere between a d and z, so try to combine the two consonants into a new sound, what does that sound like a juh sound? so it could be written as j* and it is written in some romanisations as ju or ji etc. but its not a true j sound thats just a simplification.

This is why romaji is the devil. Try to completely ignore romaji, and focus only on the real Japanese sounds and the character that represents it.

Also don’t sweat the small stuff, as you say the sounds are rare, yes, but also is no 100% right way to say them, different people say them differently, its easy to imagine that there is some single Japanese standard for speaking, but there isn’t. Even French which has an institute that officialises the language is spoken differently by different people.

づ sounds identical to ず or つ at times, this is my experience from doing Core on iKnow. I don’t think I’ve even encountered a word with ぢ in it yet so I’d say neither of these things are really worth thinking too much about. づ　is also super rare so far, I think I’ve seen like 6 out of 2000 words on Core use it.　

• This reply was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by  Luke.

づ appears in つづく (to continue) which is not uncommon. Also, 三日月 (みかづき = crescent moon). ぢ appears in ちぢむ (to shrink) and 鼻血 (はなぢ = nosebleed).

Don’t forget that since づ and ぢ are the aspirated forms of つ and ち, they’re going to pop up whenever kanji in compound nouns get aspirated… and I’ve forgotten what the technical term for that is. Nor can I find the tofugu article about it…

That’s the one. Looks like it was posted much longer ago than I thought – no wonder I couldn’t find it.

@ hey
Precisely. Don’t worry about it too much. I hear foreigners mispronounce English words all the time but I can still understand what they mean or are trying to say.

(True story)

Student: So, you know, how are つ and づ different? The pronunciation is different, isn’t it?
Japanese person: Hm? Bzzzt… They’re identical, aren’t they?
Me: lol wut

But, uh… つ and づ?