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pronunciation question

aichain

後輩
4 Oct 2007
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I'm following a site that sort of has online lessons for learning Japanese, and on it they say that vowels are all pronounced separately. However, listening to anime and Japanese songs that doesn't always seem to be the case. Can someone help me with the pronunciation of the following words please:

"chikai" (would it be "chee-ka-ee" or "chee-keye" with a long i sound. also I read that the i's in romaji are pronounced like long e's (similar to the way they're pronounced in spanish) but again that doesn't always sound like the case on anime and music. So what is the correct pronunciation of the first syllable here..."chee" with a long e sound or "chi" with a short i sound)

same thing for words like "mijikai" and "nagai".

The word "oishii", are the two i's at the end pronounced separately like "o-ish-ee-ee" or together like "o-ish-ee"

How about the word "kau"...is it "ka-oo" or is it "kow"

Thanks, it's rough not having any Japanese speaking people to talk to to hear how they pronounce these things.
 
Japanese vowels are generally different from English vowels, which makes these English-equivalent pronunciation guides fundamentally flawed. Japanese is a moraic language, which means that each "sound" is allotted roughly the same length. If the word is romanized with "ii," you can expect the vowel sound to last about twice as long as a since "i," like in おいた (oita, placed) おおいた (ooita, the name of a prefecture). The only common exceptions to this are names and places -- Tokyo, Hokkaido, and Kyushu all have long vowels that are omitted in their common romanizations.

In おいしい/oishii, the first "i" and the last "ii" are the same sound, the second one is just longer. if you were to separate the sounds, it becomes "o-i-shi-i." Phonetically, it's "oishi:" where the colon demarks an extended sound. "ish" is not a sound found in Japanese.

Your best bet is to learn hiragana, because it'll give you a better idea of how Japanese sounds work and how they are grouped together.
 
Had the time and the inexplicable urge to help... :p

[Link deleted]

Please note that I'll have this uploaded for 24 hours and will delete it later.
 
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Thanks for the posts and the upload, that makes it clearer. Yeah eventually I'll get into learning the symbols, I can see how that would help with the pronunciations, but first I'm just using romaji to get my feet wet and work my way up to the symbols. By the way I looked up moraic on wikipedia and came across the "japanese phonology" entry...it's amazing how much pronunciation has been dissected down into an exact science - very complicated.
 
yes, it's important in phonology to be able to describe different sounds as accurately as possible, and some very interesting things occur in language when you begin to string those sounds together.
 
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