To make things easier for others to explain the sound (without using IPA), can you tell us the dialect of English you speak?
きゃ has always sounded like kya to me, though it’s true that it’s often used in place of æ in words loaned from English since that’s the closest sound Japanese has.
Then there are japanese words like お客さん. Which you will definitely hear the “Kya.” If you japanese the name Carrie you get キャリー. Same with other loan words like Camping or Campaign. This one you might here the y as more subtle or non-existent.
Maybe Japanese, has no way to write down the nasal a so they just use the small ya to differentiate. And since the pronunciation itself is not too hard for them, they just know in context to pronounce it one way or the other.
I don’t have a reasoning for Kyo or Kyu I can’t think I’ve heard them pronounced a different way.
I don’t think the quality of “a” changes between “a” “ya” and “kya”.
Thing is the k in きゃ is palatalized (the tongue is closer to the roof of the mouth), but English doesn’t differentiate between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants, so they show it with an additional y. There is no y-sound, it’s there to show that k is different. So your feeling is not wrong.
5 comments
To make things easier for others to explain the sound (without using IPA), can you tell us the dialect of English you speak?
きゃ has always sounded like kya to me, though it’s true that it’s often used in place of æ in words loaned from English since that’s the closest sound Japanese has.
Then there are japanese words like お客さん. Which you will definitely hear the “Kya.”
If you japanese the name Carrie you get キャリー. Same with other loan words like Camping or Campaign. This one you might here the y as more subtle or non-existent.
Maybe Japanese, has no way to write down the nasal a so they just use the small ya to differentiate. And since the pronunciation itself is not too hard for them, they just know in context to pronounce it one way or the other.
I don’t have a reasoning for Kyo or Kyu I can’t think I’ve heard them pronounced a different way.
I don’t think the quality of “a” changes between “a” “ya” and “kya”.
How I would pronounce them:
https://voca.ro/163oUfdTyzkw
Same for “u” and “o” in “kyu” and “kyo”.
Thing is the k in きゃ is palatalized (the tongue is closer to the roof of the mouth), but English doesn’t differentiate between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants, so they show it with an additional y. There is no y-sound, it’s there to show that k is different. So your feeling is not wrong.