On one of my learning apps, the audio sounds like “Gak-Sei”. Is that how native speakers pronounce it, or are my ears just not accustomed to hearing the “u” sound?
If the “u” is indeed silent, then what are the rules for when it is silent?
In Japanese often ei and ou vowels are pronouced as the first vowel repeating. So you would pronounce it as がくせえ(gakusee). Other examples are father おとうさん(pronounced otoosan), king おう(pronouced oo)
As for rules I don’t really know but various learning resources give you the correct pronunciation and becomes easy to associate the correct pronunciation after hearing it only a few times
[deleted]
Short い and short う vowel sounds are very often shortened to the point where they are almost silent or completely silent.
This happens a lot, especially to “u” sounds. I’m pretty sure there are rules for it (I think it’s called devoicing? Not sure though), but honestly, if you practice listening and speaking more you’ll likely just kind of pick it up. The whole reason it happens is because it feels more natural.
This is one of those topics where you can really go down a linguistics rabbit hole, but a quick rule of thumb my Sensei taught me is if you have a [voiceless](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless) consonant followed by a short vowel followed by another voiceless consonant the vowel sound essentially gets swallowed up and is barely pronounced, if at all.
I think you naturally will learn which words have devoiced vowels by hearing others pronounce those words
In my limited knowledge, it always seems to me Is how comfortable the word is to say. Like gakksei sounds better and flows better then gaKUsei. You could still say it like gakusei if you wanted to. Just like desu. Most people don’t ACTUALLY say DeSU, they tend to say des. It’s also why some words change their sounds like tama (ball) becomes meDAma (eyeBALL)
That’s how my japanese cousin in law explained it to me anyways. She said it was “like explaining mouse/mice”
Same reason you don’t hear it in です
It’s called “devoicing” and it’s a phenomenon that isn’t strictly a Japanese thing. Somebody else already linked Dogen’s video which is a good reference.
Long story short, the way that consonants and vowels interact lead to “devoicing” of the vowels is certain circumstances.
It’s important to keep in mind that がくせい is spelled that way in hiragana because Japanese orthography doesn’t allow for a syllable to end in a consonant (except for ん). If you look at some cognates in CKV (excepting Mandarin), you’ll see the first kanji 學 ends in some variant of /k/:
Cantonese: hok6 saang1
Hokkien: hak-seng
Korean: hak-saeng
Vietnamese: học sinh
So, imho, it’s quite natural that in Japanese, がくせい is pronounced in praxis closer to gak-sei, even though the pitch of く is technically high in this case.
I’ve noticed that, most of the time, if -u or -i are devoiced, it’s due to the pitch dropping and/or being low.
11 comments
In Japanese often ei and ou vowels are pronouced as the first vowel repeating. So you would pronounce it as がくせえ(gakusee). Other examples are father おとうさん(pronounced otoosan), king おう(pronouced oo)
As for rules I don’t really know but various learning resources give you the correct pronunciation and becomes easy to associate the correct pronunciation after hearing it only a few times
[deleted]
Short い and short う vowel sounds are very often shortened to the point where they are almost silent or completely silent.
This happens a lot, especially to “u” sounds. I’m pretty sure there are rules for it (I think it’s called devoicing? Not sure though), but honestly, if you practice listening and speaking more you’ll likely just kind of pick it up. The whole reason it happens is because it feels more natural.
https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1095/what-are-the-rules-regarding-mute-vowels-u-after-s-and-i-after-sh
This is one of those topics where you can really go down a linguistics rabbit hole, but a quick rule of thumb my Sensei taught me is if you have a [voiceless](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless) consonant followed by a short vowel followed by another voiceless consonant the vowel sound essentially gets swallowed up and is barely pronounced, if at all.
Dogen did a very thorough video on this topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQM7BhJJns&ab_channel=Dogen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQM7BhJJns&ab_channel=Dogen)
I think you naturally will learn which words have devoiced vowels by hearing others pronounce those words
In my limited knowledge, it always seems to me Is how comfortable the word is to say. Like gakksei sounds better and flows better then gaKUsei. You could still say it like gakusei if you wanted to. Just like desu. Most people don’t ACTUALLY say DeSU, they tend to say des. It’s also why some words change their sounds like tama (ball) becomes meDAma (eyeBALL)
That’s how my japanese cousin in law explained it to me anyways. She said it was “like explaining mouse/mice”
Same reason you don’t hear it in です
It’s called “devoicing” and it’s a phenomenon that isn’t strictly a Japanese thing. Somebody else already linked Dogen’s video which is a good reference.
Long story short, the way that consonants and vowels interact lead to “devoicing” of the vowels is certain circumstances.
It’s important to keep in mind that がくせい is spelled that way in hiragana because Japanese orthography doesn’t allow for a syllable to end in a consonant (except for ん). If you look at some cognates in CKV (excepting Mandarin), you’ll see the first kanji 學 ends in some variant of /k/:
Cantonese: hok6 saang1
Hokkien: hak-seng
Korean: hak-saeng
Vietnamese: học sinh
So, imho, it’s quite natural that in Japanese, がくせい is pronounced in praxis closer to gak-sei, even though the pitch of く is technically high in this case.
I’ve noticed that, most of the time, if -u or -i are devoiced, it’s due to the pitch dropping and/or being low.