Can someone explain to me the long dash? I understand this means to draw the syllable out but I’m not sure exactly how to know what that should sound like. I’ve been using tofugo to learn my hiragana, and it has been great so far when it comes to memorizing, practicing and pronunciation but unless I’m missing something doesn’t seem to cover the ー much.
Also, how are you supposed to pronounce what seem to be double vowels? Say something reads like かあ or しい, or mixed vowels like はう, ちえ (I’m making these up as I can’t remember the examples of what confused me earlier until I pull out the worksheet I was translating into romaji). Do you combine the mixed sounds? Would that last one be more like che as in check rather than chi eh? Or hao as in how rather than ha oh? If these examples don’t happen ever I’ll go to the worksheet I was practicing on to explain what I’m talking about.
3 comments
The long vowel sound is demonstrated in a section of “japanese ammo with misa”‘s video on pronounciation, which can be found [here](https://youtu.be/cRchrkpA5vs?t=674) if you want to go listen.
For mixed vowels, you’d pronounce each vowel within it’s own mora. Like for 「はう」, you’d say it just how it’s trasnscribed: “ha” and “u”. The only time you’d say them together, like in your example of 「ちえ」, would be if the vowel after was small. For example, 「じよ」is “jiyo” and 「じょ」would be “jo”. And so, if you wanted to say “che” in japanese, you would write it as 「ちぇ」with a small 「え」as opposed to 「ちえ」, which would be ‘chie’.
Please correct me if I made any mistakes! I’m not the best at explaining, but i tried.
It depends on the pitch of the word that it’s in and whether they’re part of the same word. You’ll learn it as you get further into grammar and vocab study.
Japanese syllables are more or less pronounced with the same volume and tempo. (Pitch can change, but that’s a different topic.) So it’s almost like you could say each syllable to beats of a metronome. Long vowels take up two beats instead of one. Same for long consonants. You wouldn’t pronounce them individually, just longer.
Note that おう is just a long お and えい is just a long え, it’s not actually a vowel change even though it looks like it.
The ー is how you represent a long vowel in katakana, rather than writing the vowel twice like you would in hiragana.