Need help figuring out how the i sound works

5 comments

1. Set is not え, there is no equivalent in Japanese

   Sit has no equivalent

   See is close to い

   Lay isn’t え either because it’s a dipthong えい

   Not sure there’s a pure え sound without an い after it in English. So maybe lay but minus the final い sound

2. You should consider learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, which seeks to represent every possible sound in human languages with a single symbol. It’s heavily based on European languages, but in theory can be useful for any language in the world, and you should be able to immediately know how to pronounce a word if you read it in IPA. Wiktionary for example includes IPA transcriptions to clarify pronunciation.

   Technically the vowel sound in lay and laid is not just a long /e:/, it’s /e/ plus a glide represented as /ej/. The vowel in “set” is also not equivalent to Japanese え/e/.

   in any case the “lax” vowel sound in grin/grit/sit does not exist in Japanese, but does exist other languages like Dutch, German, or the Canadian varieties of French.

3. Idk what any of this means so let’s reset.

   When reading romanized Japanese, the first things to know are that consonants are the same as in English and vowels sound like they do in Spanish or Italian. The five vowels in Japanese are あ, “a” as in “father”; い “i” as in “quarantine”; う “u” as in “true”; え “e” as in “enter”; and お “o” as in “show”. Considering this for your last question, you can see that the English short-I vowel simply doesn’t exist in Japanese.

   The next thing to be aware of is that there are no diphthongs in Japanese. The combination あい, “ai”, sounds very similar to the English word “I” or “eye” but in English those two vowels have been mashed together into a single syllable, while in Japanese they remain two distinct syllables (even though it’s not obvious).

   Another thing is that, unlike English, Japanese vowels don’t trail off. They have a distinct cutoff that’s hard to explain in text but easier to hear when you look for it. Going back to a previous example, English “show” and the Japanese “shō” may appear to be the same sound but if you listen to them spoken you’ll hear some clear differences between the two.

   There’s more to say about Japanese pronunciation but these three can be the hardest for people to get when they’re first starting out.

   I don’t know what you’re asking but I hope this has clarified somethings for you. I recommend sticking to hiragana or romaji in the future so everyone understands what you’re trying to say.

4. い sound? Try to say ee sound without moving your lips much. The sound is also made in your mouth. Try to avoid using your thoughts as much as possible. It’s similar to Bleed or feed, but instead of smiling try to move much less your mouth.

   え sound is close to /iː/ hard to explain this one. O guess similar to Step or Bet, but short.

5. Look up spanish vowels, a i u e o. Then listen to them being pronounced there’s a lot of resources. Spanish, unlike English, has consistent pronunciation with its alphabet. Japanese and Spanish share the same vowel sounds so just map a i u e o to あいうえお.

   Once you do that then ai あい is just a + i smashed together faster than English vowels and sounds like one singular syllable.

   ee is just the vowel sound but held for two moras (length). I don’t want to bring in similar sounding English words as a comparison because it’s not helpful, using the Spanish version of the vowels/alphabet is easier and it maps to the Japanese vowels. The sooner you can move on from using English words as a comparison and into hiragana/katakana the better.