I’ve been noticing this habit whenever I am immersing in any type of Japanese content. The “ai” at the end of a Japanese word is somtimes pronounced “ee”.
For example, when watching Naruto, I realised that one character was saying “mendokusee” instead of “mendokusai”, another example is when I was watching Ange Katrina (a Nijisanji vtuber), she would say “warukunee” instead of “warukunai”. This was never covered in any learning content like books, articles, etc. I’ve only seen it while immersing, is it just a dialect? This only happens in spoken Japanese, and never in writing. Absolutely no learning material goes over this. I might just be mishearing things though, since I am only N4 in Japanese
6 comments
It’s part of how colloquial Japanese can work. Here’s a good list with explanations: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/vvoqgp/briefjapanese_solving_the_mystery_of_%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8F%E3%81%A3%E3%81%9F%E3%82%8B%E3%81%A3%E3%81%99_with/
Oh! So it’s not actually a different pronunciation!
That form is written out めんどくせー and 悪くねぇ
It’s a very informal slangy phrasing. Like SUPER informal. It can be considered masculine or even rough at times. 🙂 So you won’t really see it in any learning materials, books, articles, etc… it’d be inappropriate if not downright rude.
It’s sort of a masculine contraction of words that end in the い sound. It’s pretty common in casual speech in all media
It’s slang, so it’s (usually) not taught . It’s also not very polite, so I wouldn’t recommend using it until you have a good grasp on the language.
Just a thing with colloquial speech. It’s like how in English speech, instead of saying “what are you doing” you might say “whatcha doin”, or saying “ain’t” instead of “isn’t”.
Just a bit of Tokyo dialect that got fossilized into everyday slang. It’s common in many languages for a diphthong (two vowels) to merge into a single vowel (monophthong).
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization