Japanese can accept loan words from foreign languages easily due to their grammatical characteristic that Japanese nouns have no special inflections for numbers, gender and so on. It simply uses foreign words fitted to Japanese syllables. Japanese took many loan words from Chinese before and it is taking many loan words from English now. The percentages of these loan words are 50% from Chinese and 10% from English in a major Japanese dictionary, The rest 40% is almost a part of Japanese native words. This chapter introduces rules to fit English words to Japanese syllables. You can increase your vocabularies promptly if you know these rules.

Before introducing the rules, the following tables show us English phonemes not exactly but simply. Then these tables use "ë" and "ü" instead of exact IPA letters, because IPA letters can not be expressed with Latin-1 characters dealt with easily by PCs.

The following table shows us a basic rule to translate English sounds to Japanese syllables. This rule covers more than 85% of all the translations, although idiomatic translations still exist. New borrowed words have followed this rule at first, then a few of these words have become idiomatic sounds after they have been used for a long time.

• (*1) An ambiguous vowel "ë" refers to the original spelling, unless the following letter is "r". If "ër" locates at the end of a word, pronounce long vowel "ah'".
  • Refer to "a" as in account [ëkaunt] then pronounce "a".
  • Refer to "e" as in absent [æbsënt] then pronounce "e".
  • Refer to "i" as in ability [ëbilëti] then pronounce "i".
  • Refer to "o" as in object [ëbdject] then pronounce "o".
  • Refer to "u" as in until [ëntil] then pronounce "a".
• (*2) A weak vowel "i" refers to the original spelling. If "i" locates at the end of a word, pronounce long vowel "ih".
  • Refer to "a" as in manager[mænidjër] then pronounce "ei".
  • Refer to "ay" as in yesterday[yestërdi] then pronounce "ei".
  • Refer to "e" as in enjoy[endjoi] then pronounce "e".
  • Refer to "i", "y" as in ability[ëbilëti] then pronounce "i".
• (*3) If these consonants locate at the end of a word and follow a monophthong, change them into double consonants.
  • b → bb, ch → tch, d → dd, g → gg, j → jj, k → kk, p → pp, t → tt, ts → tts, z → zz
• (*4) If "m" precedes "n", "m", "p", pronounce "m" and spell "n".
• (*5) If "ng" precedes "k", "g", pronounce "ng" and spell "n".
• (*6) If single "r" appears at the middle of a word, ignore it. If it locates at the end of a word, pronounce as a long vowel before "a", "ë" or pronounce "a" before "o:".

Stressed vowels

English stressed vowels are generally treated as vowels whose position is at high to low pitch in Japanese.

• appróach → ápuròuchi ( アプロウチ )
• gíant → jàianto ( ジャイアント )

• 1000 Words Sample