Hey everyone! I’m still learning the hiragana currently and I already have issues with pronunciation, but a thing thats confusing me is how to pronounce the difference between these examples:
き
きい
きえい
(I get these three WILL sound different, but they’re so alike that I can’t say them without hearing them first)
きー
きっ
I’m trying to work on both my writing (at least to a decent level), reading, and pronunciation before getting into the Genki vocabulary just so I wont learn any bad habits along the way, so any advice is welcome!
Also not sure if this question is specific enough to be posted here or needs to be posted to the megathread
6 comments
It’s probably better to stick to real words as these are contrived examples that you won’t hear in daily life.
You extend the sound by just an extra like half second, when you’re trying to pronounce long sounds. You just gotta keep practicing it until you get better
> I’m trying to work on both my writing (at least to a decent level), reading, and pronunciation before getting into the Genki vocabulary
dont do that. start genki now.
Listen to examples and parrot what you hear.
To understand how they are pronounced you can do some research on “mora”.
I will give you some advice on pronouncing Japanese. When I first started studying I did not pay attention to lengthening of vowels. Example: きいて and きて and きってare all pronounced differently. It is really important to get it right because at best you will be thought at as bad at Japanese, and at worst completely misunderstood. As a native English speaker we are used to sloppier pronunciation, but once you learn a bad habit, it’s hard to break. So when pronouncing something like きいて, go out of your way to pronounce each hiragana separately ki-i-te. You will save yourself trouble in the future. Edit: you don’t need to stop at each hiragana, that sounds unnatural, but just make sure to lengthen the vowel when it is written as such.