Phonemes and pronunciations

1.2. Phonemes and pronunciations

1.2.1. Phonemes

Phonemes are the fundamental elements of pronunciation in a language. Pronunciation can vary with dialects and speakers, but the set of phonemes stay the same. For example, /t/ in time and /t/ in water have different pronunciation in American English. (Letters enclosed by slashes mean phonemes.) But they are the same phoneme, because American English speakers treat them as the same element.

In this course, I use phonemes to describe Japanese pronunciation to obtain the following two advantages:

Hiragana and katakana are grouped according to their consonant phoneme.
Japanese phonemes are related to its grammar, so they will help you learn the grammar.

There is a disadvantage however. You need to memorize the relationship of phonemes and pronunciations, because some of phonemes have different pronunciation from what you might expect. For instance, the Japanese word for the English word hello is /koNnitiwa/, which is pronounced as "ko n ni chi wa" (five syllables). In this case, /ko/, /ni/, and /wa/ have the pronunciations that you expect them to have, but /N/ and /ti/ are pronounced as "n" and "chi" respectively. I use slashes for phonemes and double quotation marks for pronunciations.

Writing Japanese with Latin alphabets is called Romanization. The alphabets used for a Japanese syllable in Romanization is the same as the syllable's pronunciation, unless explicitly indicated in kana tables in later chapters. Japanese people use Romanization when they use a language that uses alphabets. Vowels in Romanization are based on Latin (Spanish) pronunciation, while consonants are based on English pronunciation. For example, the syllable "chi" in Romanized Japanese is pronounced "chee" as in cheese. English speakers tend to mispronounce vowels when they read Romanized Japanese.

1.2.2. Syllables and kana

In Japanese, almost all of consonants are followed by vowels. The exception is /y/, /N/, and /Q/. (/y/ is similar to English "y"; /N/ and /Q/ are explained later)
Japanese syllables have either one of the following structures:

one vowel
one consonant + one vowel
one consonant + /y/ + one vowel
/N/
/Q/

The most important rule of Japanese pronunciation is that Japanese is metronomic - every syllable has the same length of time. Some linguists use the word mora instead of syllable to emphasize the fact.

One kana (hiragana or katakana) stands for one syllable, not one phoneme. You cannot describe a consonant that is not followed by a vowel, but you don't need it, because Japanese doesn't have such pronunciation.

1.2.3. Accent

There are two kinds of accent in world languages: stress accents and pitch accents (tonic accents). Here accent doesn't mean different varieties of pronunciation, such as in "His English has a Texan accent", but it means a way to distinguish words other than consonants and vowels. English has stress accents, where the strong voice determines accents. For instance, defer and differ have different accents. Japanese has pitch accents, where the high tone of voice determines accents. The strength of voice doesn't matter in Japanese. Unlike Chinese, wrong tones don't make much trouble, so you can skip this section if you want to master Japanese characters first.

Let's think about the Japanese word /kudamono/ (fruit) for an example. It consists of four syllables: /ku/, /da/, /mo/, and /no/. Each syllable must have either a low tone or a high tone, because Japanese has pitch accents. In this case, the second syllable /da/ has a high tone, and the others have low tones.

What is most important for Japanese accents is a boundary between a high-tone syllable and a low-tone one. For the word /kudamono/, the boundary between the syllables /da/ and /mo/ is important, because the former has a high tone and the latter has a low tone. Such boundary is called an accent fall, which means a transition from a high-tone syllable to a low-tone one. There is an important rule: a word has at most one accent fall, and the tone never rises in a word after it becomes low. You can determine each syllable's tone in a word if you know where the accent fall of the word is.

In this course, I split syllables to help you pronounce Japanese syllable by syllable, and I use apostrophes for accent falls. For example, the word /kudamono/ will be written as /ku da' mo no/. Note that native Japanese speakers don't always understand this way of notation, because it is highly grammatical. As you know, most people do not understand the grammar of their own language.

A combined word has at most one accent fall too, so its tone is clearly different from a mere combination of the tones of its base words. The accent fall of the last word often remains intact. It is opposite from English, in which the first stress in a combined word is often kept, such as "bláckboard" and "dárkroom".

1.2.4. Accent falls and tones

As I have explained, a Japanese word has at most one accent fall. If a word is followed by a grammatical suffix, the word's accent fall also affects the tone of the suffix. Let me give some four-syllable words to show accent falls and tones. In this table, "H" means a high tone and "L" means a low tone. I use the word /ga/ for an example of grammatical suffix. I will explain it later.

Accent fall position

Without a suffix

With the suffix /ga/

Meaning

o'	o	ka	mi
H	L	L	L
1	2	3	4

o'	o	ka	mi	ga
H	L	L	L	L
1	2	3	4	5

wolf

ku	da'	mo	no
L	H	L	L
1	2	3	4

ku	da'	mo	no	ga
L	H	L	L	L
1	2	3	4	5

fruits

ka	mi	na'	ri
L	H	H	L
1	2	3	4

ka	mi	na'	ri	ga
L	H	H	L	L
1	2	3	4	5

thunder

i	mo	u	to'
L	H	H	H
1	2	3	4

i	mo	u	to'	ga
L	H	H	H	L
1	2	3	4	5

younger sister

none

sa	mu	ra	i
L	H	H	H
1	2	3	4

sa	mu	ra	i	ga
L	H	H	H	H
1	2	3	4	5

samurai
(warriors in old Japan)

As you have learned, the accent fall is a transition from high tone to low tone. If the first syllable has an accent fall, it has high tone and the rest have low tone like this:

HIGH'		low		...		low
1		2				last

If the nth syllable has an accent fall, the second syllable through the nth syllable have high tone and the rest have low tone like this:

low

HIGH

...

HIGH'

low

...

low

n+1

last

If there is no accent fall, all syllables including suffixes except for the first syllable have high tone like this:

low		HIGH		...		HIGH
1		2				last

The accent fall rule shown here is advanced grammar, so you don't have to memorize it now.

Go to the previous page
Go to the next page
Return to the index