Nihon E Yookoso Class Notes

Nihon E Yookoso Class Page

Phonetics

The phonetic component of Japanese is straight-forward.  Each letter is pronounced in the same manner.  You do not have that sort of consistency in English.  For instance, English has a hard 'g' and a soft 'g'. Japanese has only a hard 'g.'  G as in gain not as in gem, is the way to pronounce a Japanese 'g'.

English has more than one way to pronounce the letter 'c'.  C as in celery and C as in carrot.  Japanese has no stand alone 'c'.  It has "ch" and the 'k' sound which are consistent

When you come across two vowels together such as 'oo' you merely need to make the 'o' sound twice as long.

The letter 'r' is pronounced somewhat between 'f' and 'h'.

The letter 'r' represents a sound which is not an 'l' or an 'r'.  It is somewhere in between.  If you take a look at borrowed words, you will notice that the liquids - l and r - are predominantly  salted with 'r' sounds.

That being said, once you recognize the restrictions that Japanese applies to syllable structure, you should be able to suss out the meaning of the original borrowed word.

What are the restrictions?  The Japanese language basically allows nasal sounds syllable final such as in the Japanese word for good evening: / kon / bon / wa /.  Once you understand the Japanese strategy for converting an English word or a Spanish word for that matter, you should be able to figure out the meaning quite easily.

One other factor in your strategy is to recognize the English schwa, which can be defined as an unstressed mid-central vowel sound.  In layman terms this translates as being a vowel sound that is without shape.  It is almost like the sound that a person makes who has just been punched in the stomach.

Japanese vowels all have shape.  If you wish to find a schwa look no further.  I will underline and bold it for you in the word advertisement.   /ad/ver/tiz/ment / .

Grammar

You have probably already noticed that the verb comes last.  That is the easy part.  The next item that you need to tackle is the use of particles.   Some of the particles are dead easy such as ka which turns a sentence into a question.

The particlar duty of the particle wa is to point iut the main topic of the sentence.  It comes after the word or the phrase to which it refers.  Eventually it will not sound quite so strange as it probably does now.

When you go back to the top of this page, click on;Nihon E Yookoso Class Page.  You will find an exercise on the various particles.

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