家 pronunciation when is it うち vs いえ

Basically what is says in the title. For the lesson on 家 pronounced as うち, if you listen to the recordings, the speaker basically only ever says いえ, even when the meaning of the word is translated into English as “my” (e.g. の両親は厳しいので、夜の九時までに家に帰らなければならない。–> My parents are strict, so I have to be home by nine o’clock at night. The first 家 in the sentence gets read as いえ)

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My understanding of it is that for the most part they are interchangeable, and it’s mainly a question of nuance.
いえ more so refers to the physical building, while うち has a more “emotional” meaning to it. Think of it as the difference between house and home in English.

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That makes sense on the home vs house front. And then anytime 家 would be translated as “my/our” (eg “my son”, “our family”) it would get the うち pronunciation?

My partner said it sounds like the reading voice on the vocab examples in the lesson is just a robot and that’s why it rarely pronounced the kanji correctly for the lesson sample sentences. Kind of annoying, just something I need to keep in mind.

Thank you for the speedy answer before!

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to add to that, remember that whenever the slang term ‘ん家’ is used before someone’s name its pronounced ん’ち’’ (literally means (X)'s house) and is used in casual convo etc.

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Ah yes, 家, I’ve actually reported one sentence the other day where robot voice pronounced it as け instead of いえ.

家(け)- a somewhat posh suffix to refer to the family, e.g. ロマノフ家
家(か)- one of the suffixes for occupation, e.g. 漫画家

No wonder the parser is confused sometimes. As these get reported by users and verified by Bunpro team, the errors should gradually go away.

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Hey @lindsay.shelden !

We use a text-to-speech software for our vocab sentences, and we are aware that there are still some words being misread. We have a list of words that needs to be fixed and 家 is one of those we are in the process of fixing! Hopefully these will get fixed in the near future. In the meantime, we ask for your patience and understanding.

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