ん pronunciation in 万

Are my ears broken or is this pronounced more like ‘m-ang’ than ‘man’?

7 comments
  1. Your ears aren’t broken. I hear “man,” “mang,” and “manm” from time to time. It might even be a regional dialect thing. NHK announcers say “manm” for instance, at least that’s how it sounds to me.

  2. Japanese ん is a bit more nasal than our English N. Also, it can seem a little different depending on the sounds before and after it

  3. The Japanese n is pronounced as a normal n, a nasal vowel or an “ng” depending on the surrounding sounds. It’s not so important that a mistake will make you unintelligible but it’s interesting nonetheless if you want a good accent. The Dogen videos on patroon are a good resource. As you correctly identified n is pronounced as ng when it is at the end of a word. It is pronounced as a nasal vowel when between two vowels. Otherwise it’s usually a normal n I think.

  4. ん is not a specific nasal like n/m/ng in English. It’s what is called an archiphoneme, or an umbrella phoneme that can be any of a set of phonemes. Thus, it’s better to call ん not ‘n’, but the ‘nasal’ kana. ‘n’ is probably the most common form of it, but it changes depending on the environment without speakers even thinking about it.

  5. Definitely not out of the ordinary to hear a g sound, especially when used in the right sentence context.

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