This page covers the basics of Japanese pronunciation, for those who don't know any Japanese but would like to be able to dive in to grammar, expressions and so on before they've finished learning Hiragana. If you intend to learn Hiragana up front, which many people do, feel free to skip this lesson and move straight to , which includes everything covered here.
Note: the modified Hepburn romanization system, which closely mimics English spelling, is used both on this page and elsewhere on this site.
Japanese has a moderate inventory of consonants and only 5 vowels, and most of the sounds exist in English or have a close equivalent.
In reality, there are a couple of additional consonants, but the variants left out are minor enough that they will not affect your being understood.
The Japanese vowels are very close to those in Spanish.
*A diphthong (dif-thong) like two vowels in one – it starts as one vowel and ends as another. Notice how the tongue and lips move as you say the English "oh". But for the Japanese 'e' and 'o', you want the pure vowels; this is fairly easy to mimic if you pay attention.
Most of the consonants are identical to the English spelling, or nearly so. Let's look at a few of the more troublesome.
The Japanese sound system is heavily based on the mora, the basic unit of sound in Japanese. Each mora takes roughly the same amount of time in Japanese speech.
You can think of a mora as a sort of simple syllable. With a couple exceptions, each mora contains one vowel and may start with a single consonant or a combination of a consonant followed by a 'y'.
Here are some examples:
It's worth noting that the number of moras in a word may not match the number of traditional "syllables".
*Doubled vowels and consonants will be discussed below.
Notice the 'n' that appears without an accompanying vowel? This is the syllabic nasal sound (Hiragana ん), which gets a mora of it's own. It's pronounced like the 'ng' in "sing" before 'k' and 'g', as 'm' before 'm', 'b', or 'p', and for our purposes, 'n' elsewhere. In Hepburn romanization, it is always written as 'n'. So the n's in "kangae", "sanpo", and "kondo" are are pronounced 'ng', 'm', and 'n' respectively.
The vowel of one mora can be lengthened by adding another vowel directly after it. The rule is as follows:
So 'ei' is always a long 'e', and 'ou' is always a long 'o'. Well, not quite. Whenever these pairs are brought together from two parts of a compound word, they are pronounced distinctly. In practice, these two cases are easy to distinguish.
"Doubled consonants" work similarly. The mouth takes the shape of the consonant, and holds it for an extra mora. This results in an extended sound for 's' and 'sh', and a brief pause for the rest. Only certain consonants can be doubled:
*tch is the typical spelling, since 'ch' starts with the tongue in the same position as 't', but the second spelling is sometimes used instead.
So, to use the example "gakkou" (school) again, the pronunciation is ga-k-ko-o. Your breath will stop at the first 'k' and resume for the 'ko', and then the 'o' is held for another mora.
In order to pronounce Japanese correctly, it's critical that you know a bit about vowel devoicing. When the vowels 'i' and 'u' come between two unvoiced consonants (k, s, sh, t, ch, ts, h, f, p), where the vocal cords don't vibrate, or sometimes at the end of a word, the vowel becomes devoiced. This means exactly what it sounds like – the mouth takes the shape of the vowel, but the vocal cords don't vibrate. The resulting vowel sounds "whispered" or non-existant to English speakers.
There are two particular places that you should focus on as a beginner: in the copula (to-be word) desu, which sounds like "des", and the verb suffix masu, which sounds like "mas". The 'u' in both of these is almost always devoiced in normal speech.
One other thing you should at least be aware of is that Japanese makes use of pitch accent, as opposed to stress accent in English. This means that each mora in a word may vary in pitch, but not much in loudness or duration.
The full story is somewhat more complicated, but here are the points you should focus on:
And that's it! Yes, you'll need to learn a bit more in order to perfect your pronunciation, but what you know now is completely adequate for a beginner. Whenever you're practicing speaking, simply keep yourself aware of what we've covered so far:
As you continue on into the first few grammar lessons, you'll notice a couple places where I note that the Hiragana spelling of a particular particle (grammar word) doesn't match it's pronunciation. Here are the particles in question:
Other than these oddities, Japanese spelling is remarkably consistent.