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I’m having a bit of difficulty with the pronunciation of consecutive vowels – are there some general rules to follow? Help please!
I assumed at first that you’d say them all as they are, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
For example “Kaesu” – in the Anki deck the ‘e’ here is pronounced like English ‘i’, so it sounds like “Kaisu” (i.e. the “ae” part sounds like “ai”, as in “hai”).
Are ae and ai said the same?!And ‘oo’ and ‘ou’? These have been sounding the same – is this correct?
おう and おお are pronounced the same. Same for えい and ええ. In fact, more often than not, long o sounds are written おう and long e sounds as えい – せんせい is one example.
あい and あえ are different, though. There should be a noticeable difference between かい and かえ – if you don’t start to recognise it now, you’re gonna have a nightmare of a time recognising potential-form verbs when you learn them.
Thanks Joel.
In sensei – the ‘ei’ kinda sounds like ‘A’ in English – you saying ‘ee’ would sound like this ‘A’ as well?
That’s what I thought with ‘ai’ & ‘ae’ – hence I was real surprised with “Kaesu”.
In Japanese, the way you pronounce things do not change at all like they do in English even though it has the same spelling.
先生 would be pronounced 「sɛneɪ」
かい would be 「kɑi」 and かえ would be 「kɑɛ」
Yes, I am using the 国際音声記号
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In sensei – the ‘ei’ kinda sounds like ‘A’ in English – you saying ‘ee’ would sound like this ‘A’ as well?
I get what you’re saying but its not like that. Sounds should never change in Japanese like they do in English.
the えい part is the same as the “ei” in they
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
missingno15.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
Yeah, I guess “sensei” was kind of a bad example, since it’s become a reasonably common word in English, where it’s pronounced more like “sensay”. Not sure if “they” is a good equivalent either, though. Giving any English word as a pronunciation guide is tricky, since we all pronounce things differently depending on where we come from.
Basically, the え sound is like the e in “met”. ええ is exactly the same sound, just twice as long. おねえさん (older sister) is of the few long e words written ええ. The えい in せんせい is pronounced exactly the same as the ええ in おねえさん. As is the えい in ゆうめい (famous).
I also have trouble with あい・あえ :( Sometimes I hear a *slight* difference and other times they sound exactly the same haha
Thanks for your help guys, I’ll keep an eye out (or ear) for this.
By chance, I got the “kaesu” card in Anki today…grr…maybe it’s just that one card (I hope), as it did sound very “kaisu” – anyway I will persist.
Ok, now I’m more suspicious about the “kaesu” anki card…I listened to the “temae” anki card and the “ae” part did not sound at all like “ai”, it was clearly different.
Try not to worry about the romaji spellings, focus on the hiragana, Romaji can be spelt many different ways depending on which system you use, and how you read it depends on your own language and accent etc.
Did you know you can get google to read out japanese to you…?
http://translate.google.co.uk/#ja|en|かえ。%0Aかい。%0Aかえす。%0Aかいす。%0AClick the little speaker button and it’ll read it out, with both together you can hear the difference. That said I have no idea how accurate japanese google lady is at pronouncing Japanese.
Ok so the url doesn’t want to play so just copy from http:// and stop at the final %0A and paste it as the url.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
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