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Message: <blockquote data-quote="xminus1" data-source="post: 817011" data-attributes="member: 73839">Hello, friends:This post is less of a question and more of an observation.  As in my other recent thread, the subject is pronunciation, but this time my interest is the devoicing of vowels, rather than 鼻濁音.My Minna textbook discusses the devoicing of vowels thus:  "the vowels /i/ and /u/ tend to be devoiced and become silent when they fall between voiceless consonants".A good example of such devoicing is, (I think), contained in the brief audio excerpt I've uploaded here.  It's from my Minna listening comprehension exercises.I spent a long time trying to make sense of a certain word in the attached audio, which I learned later contains a devoiced /i/.  I thought the word sounded like "sumo", but since this didn't make a lot of sense in the sentence, I finally resorted to looking at the script.  The word was 質問. I think if the speaker had given a hint of 撥音 at the end of the word, I might have been able to recognize 質問.Devoicing is tough! The audio add-in feature of my Anki vocab card "speaks" 質問 like「しつもん」 so I'm not automatically thinking 「すも」....</blockquote>