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I find that English natives learning Japanese tend to have issues hearing/pronouncing the “r” sound, the “t/ch/ts” sound (for ち and つ, respectively), and the “f” sound (for ふ) ; even the “u” sound sometimes gets mangled. Is that your experience? My guess is that a Spanish background would help a lot, at least with the “r” sound, and German with “u”.
Hmm, I don't think I've noticed myself or other english speakers having trouble with the r or t/ch/ts sounds but maybe it's something that's more pronounced for people who've spoken Japanese their whole lives and there's a nuance that I'm not aware of. I have noticed that the "ふ" sound is a lot breathier or "h-like" than the way English speakers usually pronounce "fu".
I generally have trouble with vowels more than consonants in all languages, my vowels tend to be really flat (I don't like nasal sounds so when I say "cat" for example, in english, I avoid the nasal a and voice it a bit more like an "ah" sound if that makes sense.) The vowels in Japanese, German and Spanish are all essentially the same though in my mind (disregarding the umlauted ones in German.) The r in Japanese is similar to the "tap r" in Spanish. Sometimes the "u" in Japanese is a bit like the umlauted u (ü) but it seems a bit more of an affect or personal choice rather than common Japanese, I'm not sure
The easiest way I can put it is that I think the た row romanisation, ta/chi/tsu/te/to, is a bit misleading, and the t/ch/ts are actually quite similar if not identical in terms of the thing I’m doing with my mouth during the consonant part.
I think it’s clearest with ち. English-only learners tend to make the ch in ち sound like the ch in church, when I think it’s more like…a cross between ch, ts, and t? There’s much less lower jaw/lip movement than if I say a ch- word in English. The closest English equivalent I can think of would be the ch in itch, but even that can be a bit too heavy on the ch-sound, depending on how you pronounce it.
Similarly with つ - the “s” tends to be overemphasized I think.
Yes! Similar to the above た row kana, pronouncing the は row kana consonants similarly gets ふ closer to the native pronunciation - it’s still recognisably kind of an F sound, but with much more of a H-quality to it.
That’s what I mean, yeah. I find that English-only people trying to pick up Japanese have difficulty with the r (and it contributes to the “lol japanese people always get the L and R in English words wrong”, because what it sounds like is kind of in between the English L and R), but to my ear it sounds very similar to the Spanish flap r (not having learned Spanish but knowing people who speak it).
I definitely think the umlauted u is closer to the general pronunciation of the entire u-column than what English speakers do (which tends to be closer to the oo in roof).
Like, take 内（うち）— my impression of many English-only speakers trying to pronounce that is “oochee”, which sounds atrocious to me.
It is that sound exactly. If you simply assume that whatever sound a language writes with the letter r is an alveolar tap then you will be correct the vast majority of the time. The affricate ch in Japanese is also different from its English counterpart, but since the English sound is not present in Japanese there isn't a pressing need to distinguish it to be understood.
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