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CHAPTER THREE

Making the Right Noises

Let us begin by looking at the sounds that make up the very basis of Japanese. This is one of the relatively "easy bits" referred to in Part One.

Good pronunciation symbolizes respect for a language, and that counts for a lot in Japan as in many countries. It is therefore important to make the right sounds.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to convey correct pronunciation in a written text, certainly without resorting to technical phonetic symbols. One of the main problems is that English pronunciation can vary greatly between English-speaking nations, so that any example we gave for British readers might be very misleading for Americans, and vice versa.

We therefore strongly recommend that you take every possible opportunity to try out your spoken Japanese with native speakers, and similarly to use tapes, and listen to Japanese television programs if these are available to you.

3.1 The basic sound structure

The sound structure of Japanese is simpler than English, with fewer sounds and none of those awkward super-long syllables such as "strength" or "broached" or "sixths." In English there are also ambivalent syllables such as "clear" or "flower"—are these one syllable or two? Japanese does have a similar sort of ambivalence when it comes to certain syllables, although much of its sound system is composed of straightforward "consonant + vowel" combinations.

It is actually easier to think not so much in terms of syllables as of moras, a mora being a crisper, shorter unit of sound that can be thought of as a "beat."

Japanese has 101 basic moras (moraic sounds), these being the different sounds as set out in Tables 3a and 3b together (duplicated sounds are indicated by brackets). The consonants in 3b are "hardened" forms of some of the consonants in 3a, i.e. g being the hardened form of k, z and j hardened forms of s and sometimes t, d the hardened form of t, and p and b being semi-hardened and hardened forms of h. Learning this lay-out will help you greatly when it comes to tackling the kana writing system, which is syllabic (or more exactly, largely moraic) rather than based on individual letters as in English. We defer the actual kana symbols till Part Four.

TABLE 3a: Basic moraic sounds in Japanese

TABLE 3b: Hardened moraic sounds in Japanese

It's important to note the following:

• All the sounds in these tables are stand-alone vowels, or consonant followed by vowel—in syllabic terms, "open syllables"—with the exception of -n (called the "moraic nasal"). The latter always follows a vowel and should not be confused with the n- row. It can never be used at the onset of a syllable, so it cannot start a word.

• Apparent irregularities such as shi instead of si result from modern Romanization systems that attempt to give a more accurate pronunciation guide to Western readers. That is, the Japanese si is actually closer to shi. (In earlier times it was indeed written si, and similarly chi and tsu were written ti and tu respectively.) You should not be misled into assuming, for example, that the use of sh means that s exists as a consonant that does not need a vowel.

• The sounds in the -ya, -yu, -yo columns are used mostly in words of Chinese origin, or in recent times foreign words. They are rare in native Japanese words. It would seem likely that these sounds represent an elision (contracting or combining) over time of two separate sounds ki (or other sounds ending in -i) and a (or o or u), using a "glide sound" equivalent to y. Sometimes, as for example ja or sho or chu, a y is not written in modern Romanization as it is already considered to be inherent in the sound combination. (It was written in earlier systems, as in sya for sha.)

3.2 Pronunciation

As mentioned before, pronunciation is very difficult to show in a written text, especially given the wide variation in pronunciation of English words that we might use as examples. However, we will try to give some hopefully universally understood indication of how Japanese is pronounced.

3.2.1 Vowels

There are five basic vowels in modern Japanese, corresponding (in Romanized letters) to the five English vowels "a, e, i, o, u," but in a different order. Their pronunciation is less variable than their English equivalents.

a	Similar to the first part of the vowel sound in "bite."
i	Similar to a shorter version of the vowel sound in "beat."
u	Similar to the vowel sound in "boot" but without rounding the lips.
e	Similar to the vowel sound in "bed."
o	Similar to the first part of the vowel sound in "boat" in American English.

3.2.2 Consonants and consonant + vowel combinations

These are generally similar to the English versions (both American and British) with the following exceptions.

tsu	This combination is rare in English, but is found in tsunami, one of the Japanese words now incorporated into English. The ts in this sound is similar to the ts of "cats."
hi	The h in this case is closer to a German ch, as in ich, than it is to an h as in "heat." That is, it is given more air friction.
fu	This is somewhere between an h and an f in English, rather like the gentle blowing out of a candle.
r	This is a flap, made by flicking the tongue against the ridge behind the upper teeth (a similar position to the English d or I).It has been likened to the r in the British English "very," and the t in the American English "water." It is not rolled. Some Japanese will pronounce the r more like an I when it starts a word (or after a nasal -n).
g	This is always hard, as in "get," and never soft as in "gene." Between vowels it will often become nasalized, similar to ng in "singer."
-n	This is a mora in its own right and is given equal length to the other moras. It varies somewhat depending on what sound follows it, the main point to note being that before p, b, or m it comes closer to an m sound. In fact, some Romanization systems actually write an m in such cases, as e.g. shimbun for shinbun (newspaper), though this practice is now considered a little old-fashioned and we do not follow it here.

3.3 The long and the short of it: vowel length

All the vowels can be doubled, but it is particularly common with o and u. Also, a long o sound can be produced not just by doubling the o but also by adding u to o—in fact, this is more common than a straightforward doubling.

There are a number of possible conventions for expressing a long vowel in Romanization. Some systems simply write the vowel twice, as uu, and in the case of long o, write either write oo or ou as the case may be. Other systems write oo even when it is technically ou according to the kana script, for consistency of pronunciation. Another system indicates long vowels (including o+u) by means of a circumflex accent (e.g. ô). However, the most widely used nowadays is probably the macron, a hyphen-like mark written over the letter, e.g. ō (though a long i is still usually written double rather than with a macron, for visual clarity). Unfortunately macrons are not always readily available in word-processing applications, and you may need a special font or overstrike function. Thus you may find the circumflex the more convenient.