Some English speakers are very bad at pronouncing Japanese(Like they pronounce Romaji rather than 日本語).
And some people take just days to pronounce proper Japanese.
So which is the common case? As a Korean speaker, I don’t understand the struggle of pronouncing Japanese as those two languages have similar pronunciations.
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No it’s extremely easy to pronounce (everything else is hard). Japanese has far less phonemes than English, and none of the phonemes are unique or unnatural feeling.
The normal reason for pronouncing Japanese poorly is making no effort to pronounce it naturally (i.e. to mimick a native speaker rather than just saying the word how you’d read it in English).
I know what you mean. I’ve met people who speak the language way more fluently/accurately than I can, but have thick accents. I think people either underestimate the importance of it, or are somehow embarrassed to sound “too Japanese”. And this goes for any language, I’ve met German learners who do the same, for example. But, the whole point of learning a language is to sound as close to a native as possible. I’ll admit I’ve had times where I’ve used a colloquialism and mimicked the accent from how I’ve heard natives say it, and thought to myself “wow they’re gonna think I’m such a tryhard” but honestly I like the challenge of constantly tweaking pronunciation until it’s just right
The phonetics aren’t particularly hard for English speakers, especially those with a bit of Spanish ability, but the pitch accenting (and lack of syllable stress) is often difficult. We tend to unconsciously stress words and many of us can’t really hear the pitch unless we concentrate very hard… much less replicate it accurately.
It‘s easy to get sorta right as opposed to, let’s say, russian.
But it‘s much harder to get _absolutely_ right though, since there are tons of intricacies, not to speak of the pitch accent system.
I’ve found it easy. My tutor is always telling me my pronunciation is very good compared to other students on the same level. Maybe it’s because I’d heard a lot of Japanese before I started. Big fan of Japanese comedians…
Once or twice in a session I might stress a syllable I shouldn’t, but mostly i don’t.
No, generally speaking when a language has “more” sounds than another, its speakers will have less trouble speaking the other than the other way around.
Most English accents have a lot of diphthongs and reduced vowels, which sound off if you use them in japanese – but getting these sounds accurate to Japanese requires one just to adjust their vowel system, there’s no need to introduce extra categories (Japanese has 10 vowels, English has, like, 15, so English speakers are at an advantage) Or the Japanese /r/ doesn’t exist in English but we can easily map it to English /r/ and then adjust the pronunciation.
The sounds English speakers will definitely have trouble with are ts and ry, and to a lesser extent kyo and kya, though kyu is ok. Perhaps you could also add /ao/ vs /au/. That’s because we don’t have those categories in English, broadly speaking. So we would have to “add” an extra category to our mental vowel space.
Japanese speakers have a lot of trouble learning accurate English pronunciation on the other hand, particularly things like /r/ vs /l/ where there is no easy way to map it to Japanese categories.
That said, getting a native sounding accent is always going to be hard, and most people should hope to have a foreign but not too difficult to understand accent. English and Japanese are less similar than Korean and Japanese, so it’s not surprising that people take longer to learn how to pronounce things with a relatively normal accent. (There are some confounding factors here… all the koreans I knew in Japan still had foreign accents even if the language is closer. And English speakers who have been in Japan a long time sometimes fall into the expat bubble trap and don’t bother to learn Japanese properly if at all.)
Yes. English speakers don’t know they are messing up because there are elements we don’t pay attention to in English that are very important in Japanese like vowel length and pitch. Consonants are subtilty different like n and t. So people say it’s easy, but I think they are overestimating themselves
Native English speakers tend to have some trouble with Japanese words beginning with “R”
But for the most part, there aren’t too many difficulties.
Words like Ryuugakusei really mess me up if I am out of practice.
I think it’s when people don’t realise that you can’t just say the thing you want to say, that’s when it sounds sloppy.
I know meant people who are much better speakers than me, but their accents are just terrible. It sounds like they are trying to speak English, but in a different language?
It makes me glad that learning it in high school, there was a huge emphasis on pronunciation and accent. I feel that once you start learning a language without getting the accent right, your bad accent with you until you live there and subconsciously start mimicking the accent.
It’s kind of like your accent in your native language, once you learn your native language with an accent, it sticks with you until you change your environment, and even then it’s a slow change.