I have been learning for 3 months now I am still struggling with remembering all the voiced consonants but besides that my main problem is pronouncing.
I mean Japanese pronouncing isn’t that hard but it’s more of piecing the pronunciations together and even if I can read Hiragana it sounds like I am pronouncing the hiragana or katakana separately rather than together.
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To learn to speak well, you have to speak badly a lot, ideally with a teacher who can correct the parts that sound odd. Listening tons is important too of course–basically you just need to get the sounds (of sentences and paragraphs, not just words) in your ears and, at least as importantly, in your mouth.
It’ll come with time. So in actuality, when you read English (or whatever your native language is) you don’t actually read the entire word. You see each word as a whole and basically guess the pronunciation based on previous experience and context. But you can only do that because you’re overly familiar with the words. And it’ll be the same for japanese. Once you really memorize the vocabulary, you’ll stop seeing just individual letters and will just automatically pronounce the whole word while reading. Everything starts with repetition though
I’ve posted similar before, but here’s a couple of general pointers to avoid common pronunciation mistakes you’ll see learners of *all levels* make:
* い (and all kana with that vowel) is strictly an “ee” sound. A lot of people pronounce it like the short English “i”, such as in the word “sit.” Note: Australians pronounce the short English “i” as “ee” so if you’re Australian, you’re good
* う is not much like “u” in “rude” or the “oo” in “root”. I think it’s a mix of the “oo” in “soot” and the short English “i” mentioned above. I imagine it as my mouth being in a complete relaxed, neutral position as I pronounce it. Don’t round your lips (that makes the “u” or “oo” sound).
* When い or え come after ん, the ん is not an “n” sound at all. It’s more like “y”, in fact. This is why you pronounce 千円(せんえん) as se-yen. This is also why 谷(たに) and 単位(たんい) are pronounced very differently. たに is a two mora, two syllable word(two light syllables, ta-ni), and たんい is a three mora, two syllable word (one heavy syllable, one light syllable, taa-i) (thanks u/Cyglml)
* This one might sound like common sense, but there’s a lot of English natives who pronounce katakana loanwords with their English pronunciation. Don’t do that, it is kind of annoying to do but if you wanna sound more natural, make sure you take the time to say words like スーパーマーケット with their katakana pronunciation rather than just throwing “supermarket” into your Japanese sentence.
It’s takes practice.
Hire a tutor to act as a conversation partner.
Shadow.
Consume more Japanese media
I’m sure you know but Japanese does cut corners in pronouncing in some parts (as in 原因 reads more like げーいん rather than げんいん) to make it easier to pronounce, hence natural I suppose. Otherwise I sound a more or less like I’m pronouncing each syllables separately.
I don’t know if there are well-defined patterns in those, but if it’s hard to find natives to talk to every day, I think mimicking the voice of someone else speaking could be good one. (I did that when I was learning English.) Lately, YouTube has option to set the speed from 0.75 down to 0.25 times the actual speed if you wanted to nail it.
I’m still trying to figure out how to pronounce 場合. I imagine this is a word that is an example of how important stress accent is.
Listen to native speakers. SPEAK as much as possible even it it’s difficult at first. When I was learning Vietnamese I would go for long walks repeating what I was hearing in my headphones. It really helped.
Maybe (and I realize this is more advanced) decide on a person you want to sound like. There are a lot of accents/dialects in Japanese and some sound better than others but it’s mostly personal taste. e.g. I don’t like the Tokyo accent so I make a conscious effort to not emulate it. Women tend to speak clearer than men but emulating female speech is likely to create some interesting (and unwanted) reactions if you are male.
I use methods called shadowing. Basically what u do is after you listen to a passage you immediately repeat the passage or try to speak the same passage at the same time. You can try google search for shadowing Japanese to find out more about this
One thing that has helped my pronunciation is to use study materials that have audio. If a textbook comes with audio, make sure you read with the audio (and follow along under your breath). If you’re using apps like anki, renshuu, memrise, etc make sure you’re using decks that have audio or turn on the option to hear the audio for the word/sentence.
I got better by imitation of natives.
Also weird tip but it helped, maybe listen to dogen on YouTube and try to sound like him. He is foreigner and he studied japanese phonetics rigorously so for him it’s an effort full and learned thing. Maybe this is hit or miss but for me it helped
Copy Japanese people.
Mumble it.
watch japanese tv
Best option is karaoke. Learn Japanese songs and sing them incessantly. It gives you a feel for how the sounds should string together.
speak flat like a robot. Heard this from a bunch of people .
(speaking is not my priority so don’t take this too seriously)
I’m going to recommend this paper by Linguist Olle Kjellin on how to effectively practice pronuncation [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285234145_Quality_Practise_Pronunciation_With_Audacity_-_The_Best_Method](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285234145_Quality_Practise_Pronunciation_With_Audacity_-_The_Best_Method)
But at 3 months I wouldnt worry about it too much
A thing I strongly recommend is to record yourself reading out loud. The sound will hurt your ears but you will be amazed at how different you think you sound compared to how you actually sound. Your accent is much worse, trust me!
Get into the habit of doing this and comfortable with it. I find it easy to spot and discuss my pitch accent mistakes with my wife (whenever she’s in the rare mood to hear such pain)
Take a look at Devoicing.
Understanding it is what made the difference for me.
Dogen has a great video about it:
https://youtu.be/iYQM7BhJJns
PS: also maybe pitch accent.
https://youtu.be/mxLwyrfRxEM
(probably don’t obsess much about them though, it’s just to know they exist and have the ear ready to catch those nuances when you listen)
I don’t get why suddenly for Japanese people act like simply using the language more will make your pronunciation better. Foreign lecturers at universities are extremely educated people and their pronunciations can be clearly non-native, speaking more does not lead to improved pronunciation.
Active practice in improving your pronunciation leads to improved pronunciation. A common way to do that is to shadow native speech, recording yourself and reviewing your speech with either a tutor or just by yourself to see specifically where you went wrong.
Perhaps purely in the context of beginner, simply giving it more time will help but if we want to sound “natural”, it can only be achieved with deliberate and attentive practice.
you may be interested in learning the allophonic rules of japanese. Basically that means that when sounds are put together they change depending on environment. For example, one you should already know, 「し」 isn’t pronounced “si” its pronounced “shi”.
Learn Italian or Spanish. The vowel sounds are like 1:1 to Japanese.
If that’s too inconvenient…listening to native speakers does wonders. You’re gonna need to start from easy listening stuff, literally kiddy cartoons, nursery rhymes and that kind of stuff. Japanese speech gets REALLY removed from what you read in a textbook when it gets into slang, be it with teenage kids, shonen manga lingo, older male speakers, etc. Due to social/cultural norms, young kids and women tend to speak more “conventionally” – less abbreviations, more polite language, less slang.
Also do some shadowing. Listen and repeat. Sometimes you think you have the pronunciation right in your mind but it comes out weird because you haven’t practiced it enough.
Most of all, remember it’s a long haul. It sounds like you’re just starting out. Keep at it and in no time things you thought were insurmountable will come naturally.
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i’ve been learning japanese for over 5 years now with a JLPT N3 level and my pronounciation still sucks, i just can’t speak properly , i have nobody to practice speaking with btw
If you care about pronunciation there was this video from mattvsjapan where he explained what he did to sound more natural. He basically bought a microphone on which you could plug in some headphones and the latency is very low so you basically hear yourself as someone else would and in real time. I believe he called that shadowing. Btw the microphone is kinda expensive, something around 40 bucks if I’m not mistaken. It’s not a feature every microphone has.
Some other people already suggested shadowing and I would like to add the “Mimi kara oboeru” (耳から覚える – Learn by ear）series. They come with audio that has sample sentences for each vocabulary word or grammar point. The books are structured according to the JLPT levels, so you can learn to speak words and phrases appropriate to your level. Some of them can also be found on youtube ;).
Also, shadow a lot, as much as you can!!! Repetition is key! I used to have the Mimi kara Oboeru audio files on my phone and would listen to them with earphones to make sure I heard the sounds clearly. Every time I was commuting by bike or walking outside, I would put them on and shadow them out loud to also hear my own voice. It feels strange at first, but you learn not just to pronounce the words, but also the flow of the sentences.
I don’t have many tips but a simple thing that helped me is that the “a” sound is pretty much always pronounced like the a in f**a**ther, not **ant**.
There really is no better teacher than a native correcting you in realtime…
For basic intonation it helps to be aware that tonal shifts usually happen between individual syllables instead of within one.
Honestly? As long as you’re getting your point across. Your language is working. If you think too hard about it, and make it such a big deal, you’re pronouncing it wrong, (you will get discouraged learning it.)
You can improve pronunciation by recording yourself and or whatever it is, but honestly the fact you’re learning another language in and of itself no matter how bad you are at it, you’re better than most people.
I have shit grammar and sometimes shit pronunciation of another language Filipino and kids and very particular people will egg me on about it, but I didn’t ask for their input, they are not my teacher (I’m my teacher and my wife only, honestly.)
What really helped me was going through the free dialogues on the satori reader app and shadowing the pronunciation. I went a line at a time and tried to gradually get up to the same speed as the speaker. I was amazed how physically different it felt to speak Japanese as opposed to English. I do a lot of listening to Japanese which gave me familiarity with the sounds but actually convincing my own mouth to make the same sounds was another matter! I did about 5 minutes a day for a few months until I felt more confident and then stopped – but it was a great way to get me started with speaking japanese.
I’ve been told I sound native in my pronunciation. I watch a ton of Japanese Drama and try and closely mimic the speakers. Pacing and everything. Sometimes I’ll watch the same 10 seconds over a hundred times. My media selection also tend to be more “regular” life than fantastical. Stuff like Samurai Gourmet, Midnight Diner, Terrace House. Stuff with people just speaking as they do in real life. Now I just wish my vocab and grammar could catch up.
This is just one aspect, but watch this video, or enough of it to get the main points.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQM7BhJJns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQM7BhJJns)
It talks about devoicing, which is essentially reducing some moras into a single consonant to flow into the next one better. I found it really useful, and slurring the moras together makes you sound a lot more fluent. Don’t worry about pronouncing every mora exactly, cause we don’t do that in English. If you have the main gist of the pronunciation down, you should be understood by a Japanese speaker pretty easily (hopefully)
Watch more anime…
It’s actually very easy.
It’s just the same as I am not going to tell Japanese English learners to read alphabets to improve English pronunciations.