My native language is Spanish, and from Latin America, so basically the z are pronounced like regular s, and the s don’t get pronounced with a -sh sound. Also the c doesn’t get pronounced with a -th sound, like Spanish people from Spain. Because of this, i find pronunciation maybe the easiest thing about japanese because all the sounds are really familiar and mostly the same in comparison to my native language
I would think that the most difficult thing for English spakers would be the ra – re – ri – ro – ru sounds, and to pronounce it fairly quickly/fluently. Is this actually the case?
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How about you? Is it difficult for English/other languages native speakers?
5 comments
Easy for me. I’m Australian. No rhotic R like a lot of American accents, and all the Japanese vowel sounds are pretty much the same as ones that make up some of the vowel sounds in the Australian pronunciation. I occasionally catch myself saying the sharp “a” sound like in “apple”, but it’s easy to correct it.
The only sounds I have any difficulty with are Rya, Ryu, Ryo, but I think it’s fair to say that all foreigners struggle with them.
I always get downvoted for saying the Australian accent is actually no accent at all, but I stand by it. There’s no lilts or rolls or trills or twangs or anything I need to try and unlearn.
As a French native speaker, I find Japanese sounds very easy to pronounce (outside of pitch accent).
Consonants like r and t in Japanese are much closer to French than to English for example.
From USA (east coast). The only sounds my tutor didn’t like were りょ (which I can do, but not consistently in the proper time-frame) and ふ (which had a little too much “f” in it)
Overall not too bad, but Japanese doesn’t have that many sounds, the hard part is gotta be pitch. If pitch wasn’t there it would be like the easiest language ever to pronounce.
I’m Italian, which is somewhat similar to Spanish. I’ve always found Japanese pronunciation (minus pitch accent) to be relatively easy and somewhat close to Italian. It’s not quite the same, there’s a few tricks and stuff that you gotta pay attention to (mora length, not enunciating the K too much, devoicing, the ‘r’ sound, etc) but overall English was waaaaaay harder and much more illogical to me.
As a Korean native speaker I found pronunciation to be the easiest part