Hello! I have never posted on Reddit before but I’m desperate. I’ve been learning Japanese for around 4 years now, I can speak at a semi fluent level but that’s not important. My whole journey of learning Japanese started because I like how it sounded so I’ve always tried to sound as native as posible, I learned how to pronounce vowels and consonants as accurate as possible, I’ve learned pitch accent, making sure not to use any aspiration
and I’m keeping my sounds the same length and cutting them off at the end I also understand devoicing. When i speak in my head I think I sound nearly native but when I record myself I sound as if I’m speaking Japanese with correct pronunciation but with an extremely American/English voice. I’m honestly stumped and it’s extremely frustrating since this is my dream please someone help me out so I can stop torturing myself by listening to my own voice.
4 comments
Look up shadowing
maybe hire some kind of tutor, you’ll probably be one of his/her most advanced students, and ask to improve your accent
you’d be surprised what a certified teacher can do
There are books and specialists focused on accent issues faced by foreigners. Below is the best book I found for vocational phonetics.
[https://www.ask-books.com/978-4-87217-741-1/](https://www.ask-books.com/978-4-87217-741-1/)
Surely there are more comprehensive books to consider. A teacher specialising in foreign accent reduction might be worth considering, say once a week.
For reference, in full-time language school, some of the phonetics work we did at the beginning of class for about 5 minutes. The teacher would read and the class would repeat. I think this faded away before the 3rd semester:
– For the first few weeks, all the letters then some basic words
– more words, numbers, basic conjugations
– then ~6 phrases with pitch accent
– then ~6 sentences with pitch accent
– finally brief stories with pitch accent
We moved to the last 3 tasks about a month into classes. During the week we had to gradually memorize the “task” and were tested individually after class.
Oh, I think a lot of the American students developed good Japanese accents (and my Japanese housemates agreed). The Koreans had a big advantage out of the gate.
Don’t worry about it. Straight up foreigners with perfect Japanese accents are not as cool as you perceive. If you can have good fun conversation with people and be yourself, that is very impressive. I once met an American woman who came to Japan with the military before she was even 20 years old. She married a local and lived the next 25 years in the countryside. She could shoot the shit in Japanese better than any native-level non-accented Japanese speaking foreigner I had ever met and she had the thickest Midwestern American accent ever. Absolutely charming and beloved by her community. She impreesed me way more than any Dogen, Matt in Japan, or other mimic-type foreigners jonesing to out Japanese the Japanese.