The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

[kijani]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Thanks for the offer! I'm gathering some audio pronunciation tools that I should be able to post here soon, and then we'll see where this goes from there.

[Zazaru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Can any of you guys read IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)? I would be happy to transcribe the formal syllables in IPA for everyone to see how they're pronounced, if you like. We can get into colloquial pronunciations another time, too.

Would that work?

[kijani]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Yes. Yes it would.

[Zazaru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Yes. Yes it would.

OK, I'll get on that and try to have something up by the end of the weekend.

---------- Post added at 07:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:04 PM ----------

OK, as far as IPA goes, there's a pretty good rundown on Wikipedia. The main article can be found here -- IPA -- and the Consonant and Vowel pages have charts with audio clips to help you understand the sounds involved.

I'll get a chart up showing the hiragana, katakana, roomaji, and IPA for the different mora in Japanese as soon as I can.

[Zazaru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Here's a great page on Wikipedia that shows the IPA transcription for the Japanese sounds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Japanese

---------- Post added at 11:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:04 PM ----------

Personally, I would transcribe how I most easily understand and reproduce the sounds myself as follows:

Vowels:
[a] [i] [u] [e] [o]

Consonants:
[k] [kj] [g] [gj] [s] [ʃ ] [ʃ j] [z] [ʤ ] [ʤ j] [t] [ʧ ] [ʧ j] [ts] [d] [n] [nj] [h] [hj] [ɸ] [p] [pj] [b] [bj] [m] [mj] [j] [ɾ ] [ɾ j] [w] [ŋ]

---------- Post added at 11:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:11 PM ----------

Here you go, a chart in hiragana/katakana, and my own transcription into IPA. I hope this helps.

[kijani]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Thanks zazaru. I'll be kinda inactive on this thread during the week with school and stuff (I'm a little overloaded on credit hours this semester... fail. lol) but I'll pop in more on the weekends and stuff.

[Jembru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

I have a question that I think would be best asked here as it is on topic. Do you know if there are any dictionaries, online or otherwise, that indicate the pitch accent of words? JP and I have been working on building our vocabulary, but as we have never heard these words spoken, we don't know how they should be said. We know the pitch can sometimes change the meaning of a sentence so would like to be saying these words correctly. Only one of my books indicates pitch and devoicing of vowels and it was the book I learned from so I've pretty much already learned the vocab from that.

JP has suggested we watch anime together to help with pronunciation but I'd rather save this as a last resort. I fear my voice when speaking Japanese, would go up an octave if we did this!

Also, best of luck with your studies Kijani! If you have the time, I'd love to see your input in the other Japanese thread too. Sometimes it is helpful to have more than one explanation (it took 3 different books before I finally read an explanation of the difference between 'wa' and 'ga' that I understood!)

[Zazaru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

For some reason, my IPA chart was deleted from my original post. I fixed it. Here it is, again:



Sorry about that. That's all for now.

[kijani]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Pitch and voicing is kinda different depending on where you're at and who is speaking, even how fast they're speaking. So my advice on that would be if you can read it, pronounce it how it's read. If you have the proper spelling, you might be able to find a 'word of the day' pronunciation thing on google. I know that a website we used when I was learning in high school had a 'word of the day' thing that would say the word when you pressed play. It was like a quicktime thing, but I'm not sure if there's anything that does that on a larger scale.

[Jembru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

I'll see what I can find. So, you think we'll get away with just saying the words however feels most natural? It's not so much the bridge vs chopstick thing (hashi), although that bothers us, but more that some words change the pitch of the sentence. The example in that book I mentioned, was the sentence 'hana ga akai'. Say that out loud, once meaning flower, and again meaning nose, and you'll see what I mean. The book indicated with an accent, which words had this affect and included any changes caused by verb endings etc. I guess the listener would know what we mean from context? At least the Japanese are more forgiving of mistakes than some other nationals I could mention!

I wonder if the way it is written would have an affect? Would knowing kanji help or is it just random like the stress in English?

---------- Post added at 03:49 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:46 AM ----------

I found a site exactly like you described!! Thanks so much for suggesting this. It's ideal. I can't give the link because I am on my phone and don't know how to copy and paste, but it is the Japanese section of about.com. It has so many audio files as well as the word of the day! There are quite a lot of words I don't know so I'll suggest to JP that we use this for now.

[kijani]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Glad you could find it. But yes, depending on your intonation, you can change the meaning of the sentence (if you're speaking informally for instance, changing your intonation at the end of a sentence could signify that you're asking a question in certain situations) but it won't really change the meaning of the word.

There are some words that have two or so meanings in English, but you can usually tell which ones they are just by sentence context, or the kanji used, because it will be different. If a word has two meanings, it's likely that there will be two separate kanji. As far as pronunciation though, just go with it--depending upon where you travel in Japan, you're going to see little variations anyway.

Let's use the example your book had. -


Hana - Hana means flower. It can also mean nose. There's no real pronunciation difference, but the kanji are quite a bit different. The kanji for nose is quite a bit more intricate than the kanji for flower, so if it were used, then you would know which translation would be correct.

[Just_Wondering]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Coming in late, but thanks for the thread!

Just started learning hiragana. I've got two whole letters down pat (ha).

[kijani]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Oh awesome Let me know if you need any help with the learning process. There should be tables of hiragana and katakana already posted in the thread

[Just_Wondering]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

I'm slowly going through it page by page and taking notes. thank you.

[Jembru]

Re: The Japanese Language Learning Thread (v2.0)

Hey Just_wondersing! Welcome to the unexplanably large percentage of members learning Japanese (never been able to figure out the pagan-Japanese link, but there seems to be one somewhere). Best of luck to you. Hope you get as much joy from learning as I do! I'm addicted, as many others seem to get, but there are worse things to be addicted to!