Kana pronunciations

The way to think of it, as a native English speaker, is that Japanese see it the same way that we see the /b/ phoneme.

The /b/ phoneme is made up of three aspects, it is bilabial, plosive, and voiced. We do not consider any of that separate, and only people who have studied linguistics even really know the mechanics. Without any of those aspects it is not a phoneme at all and not recognizable as a linguistically relevant sound, but if you change an aspect you can relate it to another sound in the same class. For example if you change the voicing aspect to unvoiced it becomes the /p/ phoneme.

In Japanese the た phoneme is also made up of several aspects. These include being initially lingui-alveolar, plosive, and unvoiced. Additionally, there are more aspects due to the vowel included in the phoneme. But, and this is important, it is still in the classification of phoneme which means it is the smallest unit of speech sound. Various aspects can be changed to create a new phoneme but no aspects can be removed and still have a phoneme.

This means that a Japanese person would not even consider the consonant separately (not speaking of linguists like Toritoribe, Mike, nice gaijin, or Chris, just everyday speakers) any more than English speakers would think about removing aspects of the /k/ phoneme to create a clicking sound common in some African languages. It wouldn't even occur to English speakers, and if it did occur it would be very unlikely to be considered in any way related to /k/. It would just be some weird sound one could make with their tongue and not linguistically relevant. Even if someone made the leap of hearing it linguistically, they would be incredibly unlikely to understand or even hear its relationship to the /k/ phoneme. It is lingui-velar and unvoiced, but doesn't fit in the aspects we have for airflow (stop/plosive, fricative, affricate) because it is not an exhalation based sound.

The research shows that people cannot even hear the difference between sounds not represented by phonemes in their own language unless they hear them in a linguistically relevant way while still very young. The jury is out on how young, I lean towards by 24-36 months based on the neurological anatomy and physiology changes occurring around then, specifically mylenation migration, but there is a case to be made for later ages. This is one reason why early bilingualism is so much more effective, and why children brought up bilingually can sound native in both languages while adults very rarely do.

WonkoTheSane said:

The research shows that people cannot even hear the difference between sounds not represented by phonemes in their own language

Click to expand...

Right, as far as it goes.

The interesting and difficult thing here is that た・ちゃ and さ・しゃ are distinguished -only- by the consonant portion of the mora. しゃ is [ɕa], while さ is [sa].

The oddity of ち and し is not -just- an artifact of western ears. It would be literally impossible to distinguish さ from しゃ if the consonant portion were allophonic (ie., perceived to be the same consonant). That means native speakers are easily able to distinguish these consonant sounds.

The 'oddity' of つ and ふ, on the other hand, is just an artifact of western ears. There's no need to distinguish the consonant sounds from the rest of the row here and doing so is probably difficult for native speakers without training.

Now, みゃ・にゃ・きゃ all behave as most westerners (or at least English speakers) probably expect - there's an extra 'y'-like sound inserted between the consonant and the vowel.

Here's the real kicker though.
(Maybe you want to look at this chart and see if you can see it...Hiragana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

That weirdness of ちゃ and しゃ? It -also- exists in the は行. ひ is not pronounced with the same consonant as は・へ・ほ, but ひゃ・ひゅ・ひょ are that consonant with the expected vowels. (That consonant being the Voiceless palatal fricative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

This consonant mostly doesn't exist in English, but exists I believe in a few British accents. (Monty Python's Holy Grail comes to mind... 'ひゅ-ge ... tracts of land'.)

Any-way, I think は行 is an excellent object lesson in how a row can sound subjectively 'consistent' while actually -not- being consistent. At least, in my experience, English speakers always focus on the irrelevant ふ and do not notice that ひ stands out as an exception because it's close enough that we hear it as an 'h'-sound.

That subjective sense of consistency is probably similar to how native speakers feel about た行 and さ行.