Japanese Pronunciation, Video 2: The Japanese Consonants

This is the second of a 4-part series on Japanese pronunciation. The goal is to get familiar with the sounds of Japanese and the IPA symbols. You'll then be able to learn them faster, either through your own studies or through my pronunciation trainers. More links below:

[moisesflores]

This honestly is one of The best videos out there explaining the Japanese pronunciation

[Emile.gorgonZola]

"Can I find a dictionary with IPA?" Not necessary because the sounds of Japanese are really regular in spelling. So master the pronunciation rules and you're good to go
"What about pitch accent?" There are pitch accent dictionaries, but I only know of monolingual ones. A few (very few) good textbooks do indicate pitch accent though

[Angelbratt]

So is there a dictionary with IPA Japanese? Everything I've found including textbooks, almost none has IPA and none of it has pitch markers which makes it hard to learn or tell the difference between words that are spelled the same but pronounced with different pitch accent. These pronunciation videos that even tell you what to do with your mouth have been very helpful.

[CalvinJKu]

This is a lot harder than I expected... I grew up watching Japanese animes (with original audio) and thought I would probably have a better ear for it. I couldn't be more wrong, hahaha

[Cloakedsoar]

Great content! It's a fascinating subject.

As a student of linguistics and the Japanese language, this has been very useful to spot potential phonological features that can be more difficult to recognise and produce for learners of both Japanese and English.
My current research involves scaffolding the learner to become aware of these phonological features as part of the guidelines of Lingua Franca Core (for Japanese learners of English, more specifically).

I also enjoyed how the content is presented, the pace and tonality of the voice add to it.

Thank you very much!

[theloniousm]

I was hoping to see more attention played to the nasal g as in the particle ga that sounds like nga sometimes and the go that sounds like mo sometimes because of ....nasalization I is it because the english "g" is only a rough approximation for the Japanese "g" sound?

And what about the ryo/ryu/rya sounds? I can manage the "r" after exercises but I can barely even make the ry sounds.

[sharkle]

Good vid, condensed a ton of information into something helpful

[gabopr]

What about an Anki deck to work on after the ear training one that contains the mouth diagrams to practice producing the sounds?

[paradoxelle]

R also has an allophone that should be in American English, the tap [4] which is the same sound as when you say 'better' and it sounds kind of like 'bedder' rather than than the same t as in the beginning of the English word.

[matthewdavis]

Do you plan on doing any more of these pronunciation videos for other languages? Could I request some pronunciation info for specific languages or accents of those languages?

[hongvanofficial]

hello, now i'm learning japanese but i need ipa to pronounce, can you tell me which dictionarys have IPA, thanks a lot

[adrianandronic]

Hey Gabe, great videos! They've been more than helpful. Could you explain the difference between the Spanish flap (ɾ) and the Japanese r? It's been driving me crazy. I can hear the difference but producing it is tough, even after researching it. Is the tip of the tongue further back in Japanese? Can Japanese native speakers even hear the difference? Thanks!

[perro]

Some stuff i can see in common between japanese and spanish

[akhluodes]

So the "t" and "d" are dental, like in french? So it should be [t̪] and [d̪]

[deathkt]

Is there any Japanese dictionary with IPA symbols? that would help me a lot cause I know English IPA

[xbounty]

holy crap I can't wrap my head around n at all. I wish you guys spent more time on it :P

[ikhebdieishetnietgoeddathe]

0:45 that isn’t /u/ in many of the words. Many words have /ɨ/ or /ɯ/ wrongly transcribed as /u/ in this video

[cabal]

N as in Gon-kun
r as in Kirua Zorudikku

[moisesflores]

Is the palatalized n the same as the Spanish ñ ?

[moisesflores]

Are the French nasal vowels the same sound as the nasalized vowels in Japanese after the uvular N sound ?