Doing a lot of listening lately and one thing I think to have noticed is that Japanese tend to make little pauses in speaking after particles or sentence connectors. Am I hearing this correctly? And what are other patterns of spoken Japanese that are worth looking out for.

5 comments

1. Yeah, pausing after particles is a thing. You gotta breathe at some point. You by no means have to pause after every particle, but if you need to pause someplace to catch a breath that’s a good place to do it.

2. IIRC my teacher also said you can say the particles slightly softer than you say the other words.

   Memory foggy on this though, maybe someone knows.

3. >Recently / I’ve been doing a lot _ of listening / and one thing _ I feel to have noticed / (hopefully correctly, / correct me _ if I’m wrong) / that japanese people / often tend to make a little pause _ in speaking / after particles / or sentence connectors / like て、けど、から etc..

   Being a fluent English reader makes it hard to tell where this is happening exactly, but I put “/” in all the places where I believe there to be even the smallest of pauses in my subvocalization, and “_” where I believe there’s an even smaller pause.

   I feel like one of the skills that I had to learn on my own because I haven’t read about this anywhere is where in the sentence I can take pauses and organize my understanding of what I’m reading. Again, as fluent English speakers, these moments are hard to notice because we are able to do it so fast. But the idea that in these long sentences I’ve written, the reader has memorized the entire sentence by the time they got to the end is something I would struggle to believe. That is to say: I bet you know what it is I struggle to believe even though you didn’t wait until the end of my sentence to decode and interpret it.

   The only technique I *have* read about is splitting sentences into their 文節 which I think is not dissimilar to pausing after every particle. [kokugobunpou’s article on this](https://www.kokugobunpou.com/%E6%96%87%E6%B3%95%E3%81%AE%E5%9F%BA%E7%A4%8E/%E8%A8%80%E8%91%89%E3%81%AE%E5%8D%98%E4%BD%8D/#gsc.tab=0) defines a 文節 as “文を実際の言葉として不自然にならないようにできるだけ短く区切ったもの” and suggests a technique for identifying them by seeing if you can insert a ネ or サ after one and see if it feels unnatural. But 文節 can sometimes feel a bit *too* granular.

   I’m hoping someone responds to this thread with an interesting article to read on the topic.

4. I think this may be particularly true when you are telling someone something new, unexpected ie changing topics. Like for example when you are using はto introduce a new topic.

   I tend to change topics too quickly and lose people who aren’t as ADHD as me – it’s also problem in English for me lol- so have been paying attention to this.

   Or if making a totally unexpected shift it’s like, ところで　(tiny pause) 田中さんは　(tiny pause).
   What do you think?

5. Think of it like english, how we have commas and stuff. when we say “but” and any introductory phrase there’s a pause. also sometimes when they emit particles they pause but not always.

   like u/mrggy mentioned, we gotta breathe and have moments to think

   they also use a lot of えっと〜 and うんんん, which is their uhms.

   some people like youtuber はじめしゃちょー seem to never pause at all lol, i always need subtitles