I’ve noticed at least some of the time Japanese spoken by men is spoken with a kind of grunt or growl. I don’t know how best to describe it but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. A woman I knew who spoke Japanese told me that women speak in a certain soft way and men speak in a kind of growl (she didn’t say growl, she merely demonstrated the growl through a spoken example)
Is this true? Would I as a foreign man be expected to speak in this sort of macho fashion if I were speaking Japanese as well?
Or is that growly speech like over here in the west, just an affectation that some people take on?
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It’s pretty brutish when they do speak like thay bug some guys have naturally husky tomes to their voices. So, no, you do not have to speak in a growl at all
No
yeah they love amon amarth over there
Some Japanese men do speak growly when they’re angry or want to act like a gangster. But if you have no aspirations of joining the yakuza, you don’t need to do it.
On the other hand, you also don’t want to talk too cute either. I fell into the trap of unconsciously copying how my Japanese SO speaks and eventually she had to sit me down and tell me she got turned off by that. I realized I overused でしょう and ね and had to make a conscious effort to avoid using them when speaking casually.
No, you don’t have to talk like you’re in a samurai movie. Can if you *want* to, though. It’s a free country.
I believe 広島弁 is slightly more growly. But not like, super exaggerated.
The sound of older men speaking Tohoku-ben has been likened to dogs barking since it was first heard by people from Tokyo.
Sometimes you can bark back at them. Sometimes you need a cat to translate.
>growl
Is it gruffly?
I noticed such a thing when listening to male guesthousemates talk to each other.
Sounds very tough lol
No.
[Here’s a podcast of a bunch of guys talking](https://youtu.be/xiKZlukwJxc)
Now, it is a podcast and these guys are professional and successful YouTubers, so they are definitely speaking more clearly than most people would for the most part. But it’s not super far removed from normal speech.