A Brief Guide to Japanese Pronunciation

There are only 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. That is, each of the five vowel letters a, i, u, e, and o can only take a single sound. This makes Japanese pronunciation very simple. (Or, put differently, if you can’t stand attempting to correctly pronounce all the damned vowel sounds in French then you‘re going to love Japanese.)

a like the a in father.
i  like the i in igloo. Or like the “ee” in seek.
u like the u in lute or Luke.
e like the e in met.
o like the o in Coke.

The Japanese strictly speaking to not have an alphabet, where one symbol represents one sound. Rather, they have a syllablery, where once symbol represents one syllable. They can do this because except for the five vowel sounds and the sound “n,” every sound is a syllable, that is a combination of a consonant sound followed by a vowel.

The basic syllablery is arranged as follows, so that each consonant is combined with each of the five vowel sounds. Note that there are some slight irregularities and that some combinations of consonants with vowels are missing from the table. They are missing because they are no longer used in modern Japanese, although they did exist at one point long ago.
 

There are some blank boxes in the above matrix.  These blanks are for sounds that no longer exist in modern Japanese, but which did exist centuries ago.  For instance, yi is no longer used. Also note that their are some sounds that break the pattern of combining a consonant with a vowel sound.  In the ta row, for instance, you would expect ta ti tu te to.  Instead, the modern Japanese say ta chi tsu te to.  Also, in the ha line, we have ha hi fu he ho, instead of ha he hu he ho.  But, please note that what is written as fu is indeed very close in sound to "hu".

Those above are the basic sounds. Notice that “n” by itself is not in the na ni nu ne no line. This is because this “n” sound is not of that group and doesn’t sound like them. Rather, make a nasal “nnnn” sound by keeping your mouth closed and sort of humming down in your throat, with the air going out your nose. The n sound normally appears at the ends of words, and when it does, it becomes stuck to the syllable just before it, so that it does not get its own syllable when pronounced. That is, you pronounce the Japanese word for heaven, ten, as a single syllable, not as two syllables as in te-n. Similarly, you pronounce the name of the noodle dish ramen as ra-men, not as ra-me-n. “n” is the only parasite sound in Japanese. It is the only one that leaches onto other syllables.

The only really hard to pronounce  sound in Japanese is the Japanese r sound. This sound is half way between the English L and R sounds. That is why Japanese speakers say things like “Rots of Ruck” when they mean “Lots of Luck.” Because they have grown up with a sound that is half way between an English L and an English R, they can’t really distinguish the two and often end up using the wrong one.

To make the Japanese r sound, first go back and forth between saying the English words Red and Led. Feel what your mouth and especially your tongue is doing and how what you are doing differs when you say the two words. What you should notice is that when saying Led, your tongue starts touching the top of you mouth, at the gum line behind your top front teeth. As you finish the L sounds, your tongue drops to the middle of your mouth. Say the words Light, Laugh, and Lame to confirm this to yourself. On the other hand, when you say the word Red, the tip of your tongue starts curled up at the bottom of your mouth, with the tip just touching below the gum line lying behind your lower front teeth. Say the words Right, Ready, and Reject so confirm to yourself that this is where your tongue is when saying an R sound in English.

The trick to the Japanese r is to flick your tongue up. Before you say the sound, you tongue is curled down the way it is when making an English R sound. As you go to say the Japanese r sound, however, you don’t leave it there. Rather, the tip of the tongue flicks up and wacks the gum line just behind your top front teeth. To practice this flicking, let’s use the Japanese word ramen, which as you all know is a type of noodle soup. First alternate between using English L and R sounds: Lamen and Ramen. After doing that for a few times, tuck your tongue down into a downward curl as if you were about to use and English R sound and then flick it up sharply just as you start saying ramen. As you get good at this, you’ll see that the Japanese r sound is half way between the English L and R sounds because the tongue starts in the English R position but finishes at the English L position.

There are more sounds in Japanese and these are thought of as variations on the above sounds.
 

Finally, there are what I call the slur sounds. These are the hardest for English speakers to pronounce because they refuse to slur. For instance, the name of the capital city of Japan is Tokyo. The second syllable is the slur sound kyo, pronounced as one syllable. Many English speakers, however, want to use two syllables say “ki-o” so that they mispronounce the name of Japan’s capital as To-ki-o. Don’t do this.
 

Because Japanese uses a syllablery, you must not slur syllables together. For instance, the Japanese word for rice wine is sake. This is pronounced sa-ke, with two syllables, not as one syllable as in the English word sake (as in “do it for his sake”).

Another thing to keep in mind is that Japanese does not have diphthongs, instances where two vowel letters combine to make a new sound. We do this a great deal in English, as in the words seek and received. Anytime you see two vowels in succession in a Japanese word, do not slur them together as a diphthong. Pronounce them separately. So, aikido is correctly pronounced a-i-ki-do, not as “eye-ki-do”. Similarly, the Japanese word for an motion picture is eiga. This is correctly pronounced e-i-ga.

Give each syllable equal weight and equal accent. Japanese words do NOT have accents. That is, A-i-ki-do, a-I-ki-do, a-i-KI-do, and a-i-ki-DO (where capital letters denote the syllable on which stress is placed) are all incorrect pronunciations. Be monotone and say a-i-ki-do.

Japanese has another oddity in that holding a sound for two beats is possible. Consequently the word oji means uncle, but if you hold the o sound for two beats instead of one you have the world for grandfather. In their own writing, the Japanese express holding the same sound for an extra beat by using either a dash after the sound or by using an extender character. The extender character used after “o” is “u”. So grandfather is written ouji. However, you do not pronounce the u there as a u--it simply indicates that you should hold the o sound longer. This can cause quite a bit of confusion for foreigners, so another convention developed whereby in English transliterations like we are dealing with here a horizontal line would be placed over the vowel to indicate that it should be held for two beats. This makes the word for grandfather look like oji. The vertical line is called a macron. Other transliteration systems just ignore the two-beat problem. That is why the transliteration for aikido looks the way it does. The truth is that the do sound is held for two beats (that is you keep pronouncing the o part of do an extra long time) so that it should correctly be transliterated as aikidou or aikido (with a macron.) This is also true for many place names. The Japanese capital should correctly be transliterated as Toukyou. The continuation character is not always u, however. The Japanese noodle dish ramen is correctly pronounced with the first syllable held for two beats, so that it is correctly transliterated as raamen. Writing it this way, however, causes huge problems because unless you already know the word you might be tempted to apply our no-dipthongs rule and pronounce the word as ra-a-men.

The final thing you have to know about pronouncing Japanese words is known as the glottal stop. Say the English word hacking over and over. Notice how the very back of your mouth, down at the base of your tongue near your throat tenses up and constricts air passage as you go to say the k sound. Now, say it over and over, but truly close up the air passage. Squeeze hard with the back of your throat so that momentarily air is unable to exit. You’ll find that if you do this you end up saying ha-king, where there is a little pause between the ha sound and the king sound because your throat is closed off.

When writing Japanese using roman letters (as we are doing here), a glottal stop is indicated by doubling up a consonant. Thus “mate” and “matte” are pronounced differently, the later having a glottal stop between the ma and te sounds. The word for brown belt, ikkyu also has a glottal stop as you can see by the double k’s.

This all seems like a mess, but if you took even a single semester of Japanese, it would all be cleared up. For our purposes, however, simply ask if you don’t know the correct pronunciation. Just make sure you can do the Japanese r sound, and that you pronounce the slur sounds (kyo, ryu, etc) as single syllables. If you do that, you’ll always be pretty close.