Hearing Pause Locations Within Japanese Sentences

3 comments

1. I didn’t hear any pauses in the examples provided.

   What you hear as pauses may have to do with mora timing. In the word 人物, じん should be pronounced for two mora; that is, it should be twice as long as one-mora syllables. In the word 入って, the っ represents a geminate consonant; the following consonant itself is pronounced for one mora, and this may sound like a pause to foreign speakers.

2. To me it would sound more natural as

   書く人物の顔が、頭に入っていないと、効果はない。

   But then again there is no real reason to pause at all in this sentence.

3. The other two have already said it, but this sentence has no pauses.

   What you’re hearing is places where you are subconsciously interpreting certain mora as being pauses. Taking the last sentence as an example, the four pauses are caused by: the ん making 人 2 morae but only 1 syllable, the あ in 頭 acting as a stretched vowel for が and thus 2 morae for 1 syllable, the っ being it’s own mora and stretching out the syllable, and は being hard to discern after an a-vowel, making another 2-morae syllable (provided you don’t notice the h consonant. Thus why you didn’t interpret a pause here in the previous sentence).

   Do you spot the pattern? The places that you are interpreting as pauses are places where a single *syllable* (how we interpret linguistic timing in English/European languages) stretches to 2 *morae* (how *Japanese* interprets linguistic timing). Japanese uses mora as the method of timing, and these morae are isochronic. The weird pauses you are hearing are caused by parts of the sentence where the syllable:mora ratio is not 1:1, but 1:2, causing dissonance with a system that interprets things by syllables.

   So there’s the answer to your question. Japanese uses isochronic mora, not word-pause prosody, and so getting used to mora is the important thing. There’s no real resource that I know of for it, it just comes with practice.