Syllable counting
Now you’ve digested that information see if you can count how many syllables there are in the following words. Highlight the text to see the answers.
Au to meet 2
Shimasu to do3
Wasurechatta ended up forgetting5
Su
The final part of the su syllable is sometimes omitted in speech. This is often applied to common words like desu, pronounced “dess” and the polite ending -masu, pronounced “mass”.
Ha and he
The topic particle wa is written with the character for ha (は) not the character wa (わ). Thus the ha character is usually pronounced wa unless it is part of a word.
The particle e is written with the character he but pronounced e. For more information, see the section on particles.
Most of the common mistakes come from not knowing the correct pronunciation of the vowels and not separating the syllables. English spelling rules do not apply to Japanese. For example, the word made is not pronounced as the English, but as two separate syllables, “mah-deh”.
One difficulty for English is long and short vowel sounds which can completely alter the meaning of a word. This is something you are going to have to pay close attention to. Mistakes can be embarrassing, as in the probably apocryphal story of the American who introduces himself as Sumisu san no koumon (Mr Smith's anus), rather than Sumisu san no komon (Mr Smith's adviser). Other easily confused words include (but are by no means limited to) joushi (boss) and joshi (woman), shujin (husband) and shuujin (prisoner).
Intonation
Intonation is a huge part of making your Japanese understandable. Try to pronounce everything as flatly as possible and give equal time and weight to each syllable. The best way to develop your intonation is to listen and repeat real Japanese from a CD or similar. Another good drill, called shadowing, involves speaking the Japanese words or sentence at the same time as the CD.
One tip I have included in the particles section of this guide is to pause after the particles (ha, ga, wo, ni etc) rather than before to make your Japanese sound more natural.
Homonyms
Japanese contains a large number of homonyms (douonigigo). Homonyms are words that sound the same but have different meanings e.g. blue/blew, lead/led etc. These can be distinguished either by context or by their kanji in the written form. Some words can have up to ten homonyms. An interesting sight in Japan is watching one person draw a kanji in the air to explain a word to another person.
Pronunciation practice
The king of all pronunciation drills has got to be the simple “listen and repeat”. You can use a CD or a live teacher to help you. Stick with Japanese sentences that you can comfortably repeat at first. Pay close attention to the intonation, the weight given to each syllable and where the pauses come. Make sure to get feedback from your teacher about any words or sounds you have difficulty with. Good pronunciation is not something that will come overnight but it can be improved so stick with it.
A variant on this drill is called shadowing. Here, you attempt to speak along with the CD you are listening to. You will need a script for this and it is quite difficult. It's definitely worth giving it a go.
If you are having trouble memorising or repeating long sentences one tip is to start at the end and work backwards. For example:
...ikimasu.
...gakkou ni ikimasu.
...kuruma de gakkou ni ikimasu.
...tomodachi no kuruma de gakkou ni ikimasu.
...mainichi tomodachi no kuruma de gakkou ni ikimasu.
...Watashi ha mainichi tomodachi no kuruma de gakkou ni ikimasu.
(As for me/every day/friend's car/by/school/to/go.)
By doing this, you can build up to quite long sentences a little more easily than you would starting from the beginning.
To a beginner, native speaker speed Japanese can sound extremely fast. One trick I picked up to make it more manageable was to use my PC to slow it down. You can do this with a free program called Audacity. Audacity allows you to import audio files from CD or tape or even record straight onto a microphone. The files can then be slowed down (or speeded up) as desired using the “change tempo” function.
Other language learning tricks you can do with Audacity include adding periods of silence to a track to give yourself time to repeat sentences and recording Japanese with your own voice. I recorded many of the idioms in Japanese Idioms onto mp3 files myself for listening practice.
At the close of this chapter I would like to impress upon you the importance of developing good pronunciation as early as possible. The Japanese are much more picky about how their language is pronounced than English speakers are. It's possible this is due to the fact English speakers get more exposure to foreign accents or it could be something that is inherent to Japanese (or both). Good pronunciation covers a multitude of sins and will make your Japanese seem much better than it actually is. On the other hand, even someone with an extensive knowledge of grammar and vocabulary will sound awful if their pronunciation is poor.
To find out how to download the sound files that accompany the free flashcards on this site, go here.
