Hey, I’m one year into learning japanese and thought I had my silent vowels down. When the [i] or [u] vowel occurs between two unvoiced consonants, it is silent. When they occur at the end of a word, after an invoiced consonant, they should also be silent (e.g. です).
Today I encountered the word 双節棍 (ぬんちゃく) and was very confused to find all pronunciations with a voiced う in く. Why does this happen? What’s the actual rule at the end of words?
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From my understanding, い and う are “silent” because they are, respectively, following the vowel え and お, and hence making the vowel long. You see this in とうきょう (pronounced as TAW KYAW, long o), たんてい (TAN TEH, long e), etc.
The silence う in です or ます are kind of special cases. They are very common endings of a sentence so many people silence the う. But I have heard the う pronounced in more formal settings, or when the speaker wants to emphasise that they are being “polite” and speaking this form of speech (sometimes being sarcastic).
One thing to always keep in mind is that this process is usually optional. Some speakers/dialects pronounce the vowels out in full, and it’s definitely more common to pronounce the vowels out when speaking carefully (like when recording a word in isolation).
Also, with /s/ and /h/ the vowel can be fully absorbed by the frication of the consonant, but with other consonants typically the vowel isn’t fully deleted, but rather devoiced/whispered. This is why -ki and -ku at the end of a word will still sound clearly distinct. I’m not sure if it’s a real pattern but I get the sense -ki and -ku tend to be pronounced a bit more carefully to compensate for this.
Pitch accent also (inconsistently) plays a role in this, for example 好き is heiban, meaning it has a higher pitch on the き, so it’s more likely for the す to undergo devoicing.
Last thing, at the ends of words, all this only really applies if it’s the last word in the utterance – if you start the following word with a voiced consonant, the vowel must be pronounced, so something like ヌンチャクです would always have a clear /u/ before です.
When people speak quickly and casually it might seem like some vowels are “silent”, but they aren’t necessarily and it is not a steadfast rule that they will be.
If you want to hear someone speaking articulately in Japanese, the guy who does [this podcast](https://youtu.be/walgi0uCtoc?si=xbBV3_zwoqYx73iE) often very clearly pronounces the う in です/ます and the like.
yeah when I first leant I voiced all my end vowels… then I was listening to friends and noticed they didnt voice a lot of end vowels… so I started copying them… then one day one of my friends took me aside and said “you’re pronouncing this word and that word etc wrong… it has an “u” a the end of it… I was bit baffled, I said “well you dont say it lol!” but she said yeah we do, it’s all just about accent and people sating things quickly etc….
I think if you pronounce the vowel, no-one will think less of you, or that youre doing it wrong.
I’m Japanese, and I still may be wrong, but I don’t think we have silent vowels? What are examples?