Common Pronunciation Errors

Here I'm going to list the pronunciation mistakes that I hear most often. However, it's not something that you need to worry about too much. Every now and then throughout your studies, you can come back and look at these and make sure that you're not making one of these errors. If it stresses you out too much, just skim right over them and move onto the Brain Prep #1 details.


Common Error #1 - The Gaijin "A"

This is the worst one, by far, that I hear gaijin making.

When people first learn how to pronounce Japanese, someone tells them, Oh, あ / a / is like the “a" in “father." But there's a huge problem with this explanation: The pronunciation of the English language is varied, messed up, and geographically inconsistent.

For example, I have a friend from Manchester, and the “a" in his pronunciation of “father" is closer to the “a" in my (Californian) pronunciation of “fat."

Let's take a look at a scary chart:

This chart is taken from this page on Wikipedia, and it's showing the various vowel sounds that humans make. If you go to that page, then you can click on the various vowel sounds in order to hear them. The one that my mouse is hovering over [ä] is much like the Japanese “a" sound. Around it, you'll notice that there are like five different “a" sounds, so it might be a bit overwhelming, but you'll get used to it if you just make a point of listening for the pronunciation of the Japanese “a" as you interact with native speakers throughout your studies.

You can also try cool things like shadowing, singing along to Japanese music, YouTube videos and pronunciation lessons.


Common Error #2 – The Gaijin "R"

I'm pretty sure that at some point in my ignorant childhood I must have made fun of an Asian person for not clearly dividing up their L's and R's. And, who knows, maybe you have too.

If so, retribution is at hand.

Five years ago, when I went to a Japanese school in Tokyo, I remember that my class was practicing potential forms in Japanese, words like 食べられる / taberareru / “to be able to eat."

Ta-be-ra-re-ru. Look at all those R's! So I said something like Taberareru, and my Japanese teacher mimicked my super-gaijin R's, and everyone in the class laughed at me.

Ouch. I suppose justice was served that day.

The reason that they were making fun of me is that when I first started studying Japanese, they always wrote the Japanese ら り る れ ろ as ra-ri-ru-re-ro. But the Japanese “R" sound is not the English “R" sound—it's totally different.

If you watch this video by Tofugu, he'll tell you that it's more like 70% R, 20% L, and 10% D. Only, I can't calculate percentages while I talk. (He actually explains it much better than that, by the way.) So I go look at Wikipedia, and I get this thrown at me:

/r/ is an apical postalveolar flap undefined for laterality. That is, it is specified as neither a central nor a lateral flap, but may vary between the two. – Japanese Phonology (Wiki)

Awesome. Thanks for clearing that up, Wikipedia... said person with a PhD in Linguistics.

Or, if you're like me, and you don't understand a word that I've written so far, then you can just use my trick: Flap it.

Seriously, “flapping" is a real thing. I once read an academic article about Flapping in North America. Flapping is that thing that (some) English speakers do when they come across a double “t" or “d" sound.

For example, most North Americans flap the double “t" sound in the word “butter." So, it doesn't sound like the “t" in “tea."

Here's another weird chart from Wikipedia:

Notice that the North American flap consonant is really similar to the Japanese flap consonant. So, if you're North American, then just make that double “t" sound whenever you need to make a Japanese “r" sound. I've been doing it for years now, and no one laughs at me anymore.

If you're from the UK or some other place where they don't flap it, then I have no idea what you should do. If you know, please tell me (for example, by commenting below)!

Also, if you think that all of this worrying about “L" and “R" is simply not worth your time and you want to be lazy, then I recommending opting for the “L" sound over the “R" sound, as you're less likely to get criticized for it.


Common Error #3 – Intonation & the Deadly Pitch Accent

Have you ever seen the movie 『雲の向こう、約束の場所』 / Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho / “Beyond the Clouds, the Promised Place" / English title: The Place Promised in Our Early Days? In the opening scene of that movie (which I love, by the way), just after the violin starts playing, it cuts to a high school girl reading the poem “Morning of Final Farewell," by Miyazawa Kenji and it's just beautiful.

はげしいはげしい熱やあえぎのあひだから
おまへはわたくしにたのんだのだ
銀河や太陽、気圏などとよばれたせかいの
そらからおちた雪のさいごのひとわんを……

In between the oh-so violent fevers and gasping,
You asked me to get
The last bowl-ful of snow, descended from the skies,
The realm of galaxies and suns and atmospheres...

宮沢賢治、 「永訣の朝」 / Miyazawa Kenji, “Morning of Final Farewell" ( Link to Poem / Link to Video Clip)

There are times when Japanese really does sound like music. A lot of Japanese people will complain to you that English is difficult, because it has stressed syllables, but they say that Japanese is flat, so it's easy. They are both correct and incorrect in saying so.

English uses a stress accent. Accentuated syllables are spoken louder and held for longer. English sentences are usually made up of content words and structure words. Content words are important, so they get the stress, whereas structure words are not important, so they get passed over. Consider this sentence:

Have you read that new book by Stephen King?

Most English speakers would put extra stress on those bold words. Or maybe everyone is talking about how they love that new book by Stephen King. Then I turn to you and I say:

Have you read that new book by Stephen King?

We can express a lot of meaning through stresses like this, and Japanese people often find it very difficult. For example, most students (unless they're quite advanced) would not catch the difference between those two sentences above.

Japanese doesn't use a stress accent. Instead, they have something called a pitch accent. This means that the pitch of someone's voice falls after they hit an accented syllable. Sounds confusing, right? Allow me to freak you out with yet another Wikipedia chart:

So if we look at the word はし / ha-shi, accenting the first syllable and then dropping the pitch for “shi" would mean “chopsticks," but if we start with a low “ha" and then move up to a higher pitch for “shi," then it could mean “bridge" or “edge."

Are you freaking out yet? Don't worry, because it's not actually that bad.

I have never explicitly studied the pitches of individual words, and yet I'm highly proficient in Japanese. Also, Wikipedia assures me that “Recently, a study recording the electrical activity of the brain has shown that Japanese mainly use context, rather than pitch accent information, to contrast between words which differ only in pitch."

So forget it! Right? Well, not exactly. Don't worry about it, but at the same time don't ignore it. I think that all you really need to know is:

  1. Know that intonation and pitch accents exist in Japanese.
  2. Try to imitate the way native speakers talk.

That should be plenty.

You could choose to hate the existence of a pitch accent. Or, instead, you could join my team and love the music it allows for. After all, the lack of a stress accent gives Japanese that melodic sound, the measured rises and falls, the rhythmic, flowing syllables of that high school girl's voice as she reads out a poem, a story about another girl—one that, on her deathbed, is eating bowl-fuls of snow.

Complete and Continue