Pronunciation videos

Japanese
#1

Forgive me if this has been asked before, but is there a resource that people especially recommend for getting some pronunciation fundamentals down?

I’m having a ton of trouble picking up on long vowel sounds for u and o - and that’s also showing up in difficulties in remembering how to spell words that have them. I’m fine with other long vowels - I hear the difference between ojisan and ojiisan just fine. But when it comes to picking up the difference between sounds like きょ and きょう, especially in the middle of words, I’m not catching it.

I’m thinking this must the topic of one or two (hundred) YouTube videos - but does anyone have any suggestions for an especially good resource?

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#2

I’ve never personally used it, but Dogen’s course has very good reviews and he is very well respected in the Japanese education space. He has some free sample videos of his lessons on Youtube I believe and then to access the rest it requires subscribing to his patreon (?)

A resource I’ve used and liked was Japanese: the spoken language by Eleanor Jordan and Mari Noda. The book has an accompanying CD with pronunciation drills and those audio files can be found online - I have a link to them buried somewhere in my resources if you ever end up wanting it, let me know and I can go looking for it :slight_smile:

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#3

Thanks, Gacee. I looked at his videos and watched a few, and they seem like they’re very useful for each of the points - but he doesn’t seem to have anything on long vowels in the samples. If I’m unable to find any free sources I like, maybe I’ll take a look at his patreon. I’m not sure I’m quite ready at this stage of learning to start really worrying about pronunciation generally, just that this point seems important for me to pick up.

If you have a moment and it wouldn’t be too much trouble?

#4

Just out of curiosity, is your native language English?

I wonder if reading up on the difference between stress timed and mora timed languages could help a little bit in distinguishing long and short sounds.

#5

Yes, I’m a native English speaker. I’m not familiar with the reference to languages being stress timed vs mora timed, but I’ll use those terms to look for an explanation. I started with asking for video simply because I assumed that this would be something I’d have to listen to rather than read about, but I’ll give that a whirl.

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#6

I think dogen has a free video on this but I’m struggling to find it.

English is a stress-timed language , where the rhythm is determined by the interval between stressed syllables, resulting in variable syllable lengths. In contrast, Japanese is a mora-timed language , where each sound unit (mora) has roughly equal duration, leading to a steady, metronome-like rhythm

I found it difficult to pick up on to begin with then started listening regularly to native Japanese even if I couldn’t understand it (I put it on as background noise either audiobooks, terraced house or some podcasts) and now I can pick it up relatively easily to the point where I can write whatever I’ve heard in hiragana even if I don’t know the word. For me it took a lot of time and active/passive listening but it comes in the end. Repetition helps and I’ve even done sentence audio flash cards which helped when using them for shadowing.

Not sure if any of that may be helpful for you or not though.

May or may not be relevant but I am a native English speaker.