Hey y’all. While going through an Anki deck, I realized that there is a discrepancy between the way the audio for a card pronounces ください and how I pronounce it. In the case of the card, it is pronounced very clearly, with each mora consisting of a very clear consonant-vowel sound pair. In my case, I noticed that the d sound in だ would always be softening in a way, with my tongue shifting from u to a while only half pronouncing the d (the tongue approaches but doesn’t make contact with the palette, making a sound somewhat similar to a voiced “th”). It feels similar to how consonants sound while slurred, but given I had no success in finding what this phenomena is called, I can’t say for sure whether this pronunciation is correct. So, the question is, in regular speech, are the the consonant sounds meant to be pronounced clearly, or do they tend to be slurred somewhat like in my case?
1 comment
In phonology this is called lenition or weakening. As far as Japanese /b/ and /g/ can often be ‘slurred’ in a similar way to what you describe. But I’ve never heard of /d/ being weakened this way (in Japanese). I would say, if you can, try to pronounce it clearly. However in the case of ください it’s probably fine to slur it a bit due to it being such a common verb form