Timeline for What is the pronunciation of ai?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
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| Jul 28, 2017 at 1:22 | comment | added | cloveapple | I may have taken your suggestion that I "first fully grasp" the vowel sounds too literally. And yes, the examples of pronunciation differences I gave weren't the best. | |
| Jul 27, 2017 at 17:28 | comment | added | psosuna | And from a learner's standpoint, concern yourself less with whether the pronunciation is 100% correct to start -- I can't claim to have native pronunciation myself, but I aim for a degree of consistency and clarity. It helps and I am generally easily understood, save for grammar mistakes I might make or when vocab fails me | |
| Jul 27, 2017 at 17:27 | comment | added | psosuna | I fully comprehend your stance, and in a lot of ways, yes, it is a simplification to say that there aren't some discrepancies in flow when it comes to pronunciation. In the case of the examples you've provided, that is a discussion of mora/syllable stress in a word. For example, the fact that the 「う」 sound in the 「す」 of 「です」 is not because the vowel sound is changing but rather because the length is changing, as a result of the emphasis of 「で」. If anything, any vowel pronunciation inconsistency I've observed is closer to different people with different accents/dialects. | |
| Jul 27, 2017 at 9:10 | comment | added | cloveapple | 1) As someone coming to Japanese late in life, I don't expect to ever pronounce Japanese 100% correctly. 2) The 1st thing I learned was that Japanese vowel sounds don't change, and that written kana could be simply sounded out. The 2nd thing I learned was that this is a simplification. Devoicing is a simple example. (Imagine sounding out 「です」 or 「けしき」exactly as written.) More complex examples happen when sound variations that are a single phoneme in one language are 2 phonemes in another language. (The answers are telling me it's not a difference in phonemes, but I couldn't know till I asked.) | |
| Jul 26, 2017 at 22:44 | history | answered | psosuna | CC BY-SA 3.0 |