Road to Japan: Basic Japanese and Pronunciation

Let's start nice and simple. Japanese has 5 standard vowels, much like English, and even has similar sounds - to a degree. For example, our vowels are A - E - I - O - U. In Japanese, or rather, in romaji (i'll explain this in a little while), these vowels are expressed like this: [English on the left, Japanese on the right]

A - ah

I - ee

U - oo

E - eh

O - oh

An easier way to remember this is the pattern your mouth forms upon saying the Japanese equivalents. When you read out the above aloud you'll notice your mouth starts off wide with the ah, closes slightly for ee, closes a lot for oo, begins to open again for eh, and your eyebrows raise for oh. Combining muscle memory with learning is a dramatic way to improve memorization skills, because it means taking conscious thought and translating it into a physical action. You're not only running through the motion of creating that contraction, but you're also going through the motion of assigning that muscle movement to sounds, letters, and meanings. 

You said romaji earlier? What the hell was that? You'll notice that beside the English vowels above, there are some weird words that are basically just sounds to your average person. These are English interpretations of the Japanese vowel system, in other words: rather than using the Japanese alphabet to express 'ah' 'ee' 'oo' 'eh' and 'oh', we're using English letters. This is romaji, basically this just means it's the romanized version of Japanese. Essentially just an English translation. But why not use the Japanese alphabet? Because to most Western people it is indecipherable. It quickly escalates the difficulty and we're not ready for that yet. However, I will explain the various Japanese scripts:

Romaji - Romaji is, as stated above, just the English translation of Japanese words using the English alphabet. But when I watch Naruto they all say Rasengan, or the subtitles say that? In Japanese rasengan roughly means swirling vortex, or rotating ball (up for interpretation). This was likely a directors discretion for the English dub/sub, it happens all the time in anime. It's far cooler to shout 'Rasengan!' or 'Chidori!' then it is to shout 'Swirling Vortex-Rotating Ball attack!' (which is what they're actually shouting in Japanese). However, you'll notice that in the dub of Naruto you'll have Kakashi shouting 'Lightning Blade!', why? Because it's cooler in English to say that than the Japanese version: kaminari ha! Lightning blade just has more understanding in English since it looks like Kakashi is wielding a blade made of lightning, saying the Japanese for it is different than saying rasengan. Don't forget, the point of the dubs and subs is to get you to repeat the real cool phrases over and over, so a few stylistic choices are made to support that.

Kanji - Kanji is the monolith in all of this. There are two more sets of Japanese writing below - Hiragana and Katakana - that have specific purposes. But kanji is basically the road to fluency, however, not even Japanese children start with learning kanji. They start with hiragana, move onto katakana, then onto kanji. So further down the Road to Japan, we'll come back to kanji, but it's best to forget all about it for now.

Hiragana - This was Japan's first basic writing system. It contains a system similar to the English alphabet, and isn't too difficult to pick up. This should be your building block to learning to read in Japanese.

Katakana - Katakana is mostly used for things like, emphasis, sound effects, foreign names, and foreign words. For example, television is Japanese is teribi. Teribi is written using katakana, as it's a foreign word to the Japanese language. 

The key thing to remember is, in Japanese, all of the above are mixed. Kanji is generally the meat of the sentence, hiragana gives the grammar, and then the katakana pops up when something foreign to the natural Japanese language comes up. This sounds a little daunting as you've literally gotta catch 'em all to start understanding things. Another piece of logic is that even if you learn the alphabets perfectly, with the sounds, sure you'll be able to read things out, you'll just have no idea what you're reading actually means - since you don't have the vocabulary to back it all up. So let's break it all down into chunks we can actually process:

In a while I'll start introducing the scripts to the journals, but let's just get involved first before we start doing that is totally out of the comfort zone for anyone from the West. Below is some basic vocabulary to learn, and to test our pronunciation.

Ringo - Apple

Neko - Cat

Inu - Dog

Biru - Beer

Genki desu ka? - Are you healthy?

Hai - Yes

Īe - No

Nihongo wa hanasemasu ka? - Can you speak Japanese?

Okay, the last one is meant to throw you; but I'll get to it in a second. An important note in Japanese pronunciation is that no word or syllable is ever stressed. Let's take Cat/Neko as an example. In English when saying 'cat' we effectively go 'ka-AT-uh', or at least you're supposed to. Now trying saying 'cat' with no stress or emphasis on any of the syllables, just a straight 'cat' - 'kat'. Try thinking of at as k@. Basically all Japanese pronunciation follows this. When saying 'neko' say it all in one flat word, rather the English way of 'Nek-oh'. With this in mind the other words become easier, aside from the final three.

Genki desu ka? (Are you healthy?) Most people would see this an equivalent to 'how are you?' Which it kind of is, but you're only supposed to ask this to someone you haven't seen for a long time. This brings us to the next level. The 'ka' at the end basically means question mark. That's why you never seen a question mark appear in Japanese writing, because it actually takes the written form of 'ka' (in script). So throwing a question mark on the end in Japanese writing is pointless, because it's the equivalent of saying: how are you question mark? If you read that allowed including the punctuation you say question mark twice. Hang on, when I say desu it sounds weird when followed by ka? Kind of like it's out of place? 

This is a slightly sworded piece of advice, but i'll say it anyway. Whenever you see a 'u' in Japanese, just slur it. So genki desu ka becomes genki des(u) ka. The u is practically silent. Now, before someone hurls something at me, if you're talking to someone you want to show respect to, or you're in a scenario where respect is required, you would pronounce the u. But at that stage genki desu ka becomes o-genki desu ka. As the o- is an honorific prefix (a word, letter, or phrase that appears before another word or letter). So just be slightly mindful of that.

Hai (yes) is effectively said as 'high', but it's said quickly and meant to be affirmative. When said slowly - haiiii - think of it as a lazy yes, like someone is telling them off for being lazy, so they respond with a lazy haiiii/yeah... It's best to think of hai with an exclamation mark - hai! 

Ie (no). When we scroll back up to our romaji vowel set, we set that Ie can be broken down into: I - ee, and, e - eh, which = ee-eh. Trying saying it as E-A in English, with a stress on E yet slurring into the A. But you said there wasn't any stresses in Japanese? Well, that's still true. You'll notice that the vowel I in Japanese is spelt with two ee's. In English when a word has the same letter after another we generally pronounce the repeated word again. If this occurs in Japanese, they just elongate the repetition so it all coalesces into a single longer version. This turns Ie into ee-eh, which means, ee lasts for another beat. In other words, than saying e-e, we say ee. They last the same amount of time, if you say e, break, e, it will last the same as saying ee in Japanese. 

Nihongo wa hanasemasu ka? (Can you speak Japanese?) Above we talked about slurring the u's and that ka is basically a question mark in written form. If you try saying the phrase quickly you'll pretty much get it right first time. A good pronunciation idea is to basically chain words together: nihongo-wa, pause, hanasemas(u)-ka? If you listen to a Japanese speaker this is the general pattern they take up if they're not rushing. Think of the pause as an English person saying 'errrr' or something. 

And that's it from today's journal!