Navigating Speech Impediment While Speaking Japanese

6 comments

1. If you look at the functions of で, they heavily suggest another chunk of phrase to follow right behind – this is highly confusing if you were to replace ですwith で.
   Something that vaguely sounds like ですか, I can autocorrect as long as that is the path of least resistance. If I hear で though, interpreting that to です isn’t going to happen.

   Is it not possible to say “でthか”? That would be a close enough approximation.
   Using “ts” would make it sound like でつか which is still an intermediate step that requires another autocorrect. “th” has no Japanese counterpart, as such it’s probably easier to interpret directly to *a slightly mispronounced ですか, but definitely passable*.

2. I feel like when there is a problem of articulatory precision in a speech pathology, reformulating the sentence could be the way to go sometimes, or code switching.

   For です code switching doesn’t help but perhaps it worth considering omitting when possible, or using less/more formal alternatives.

   If you have similar articulatory problems with words, trying to find katakana/English equivalent helps.

   Part of the learning process for everyone (and especially if you have speech impediment) is figuring out what linguistic devices are the most natural for you to express yourself. Basically, in your case it will be a list of words to avoid.

   If your speech is particularly severe, consider using text-to-speech but I think close colleagues will be able to adapt, and customer language questions are probably constrained enough to allow for high pronunciation variation/noise.

3. I feel like the su is soft enough anyway that で+th would be fine. My Japanese friend legit talks like that anyway. All of the s sounds are super soft and sound closer to th. It’s not a hard s like it is in English. I think because it’s over annunciated in anime people get confused. I literally had someone compliment me for how relaxed my tongue was because the number one mistake foreigners make in pronunciation is the way they say their rs and over annunciation. As long as you try your best people will do their best to fill in what they don’t understand. Our brains do that automatically anyways. Fr xmpl yu cn prbbly rd ths. Don’t let yourself get stuck on one sound, because Japanese people are honestly happy to hear foreigners speak Japanese in general, regardless of how good they are.

   [this](https://youtu.be/9TzXD8dt7ks) is an example (when he says です). I was trying to link you to one of my friends streams but ig he took them down bc he hasn’t streamed for a year…

4. Japanese doesn’t even have a “th” sound in its set of possible phonemes. Foreign words with “th” are usually transcribed as s, j or z in katakana (マーガレット・サッチャー, ジ・エンド、ザ・ワールド, etc）.
   Even if you say “th” a Japanese person will likely just hear it as an allophone of “s”, like how we English speakers hear the “tt” in “latter” or “butter” as a “t” even though the actual phoneme is practically the same as the らりるれろ “r” sound in Japanese. They’re less likely to notice an inappropriate “th” than English speakers are. You’ll be understood just fine even if it isn’t perfect.

5. I just break it down to syllables, practice slowly and then speed it up.

   My biggest issue with my speech impediment is when there are sh and s sounds close together. So words like さしみ are challenging because my mouth wants to pronounce it like しゃしみ.

   So by breaking it down and practicing pronunciation of each syllable and then putting it all together helps a lot.

   If you can afford it, go to a speech pathologist. They can suggest exercises to help with the sounds that you have issues with.

6. At the risk of stating the obvious:

   Mispronunciation is almost always gonna be better than complete omission.

   There are Japanese people with lisps and other speech impediments, too, and they get understood (well, to varying degrees I suppose, as in any language).