Japanese has a very simple syllabic system which is easy to learn. The most syllables consist of simple combinations as a consonant followed by a vowel. The total number of the syllables are only around 150 including the syllables for loan words. The syllables for Japanese native words are counted to around 100.
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Japanese has the system of 5 stable vowels, which is the most popular among languages in the world, like Spanish. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Strictly speaking, they are slightly different from the real sound of Japanese. The best way to confirm these sounds is to listen to the real sounds pronounced by a native speaker of Japanese. In this article, I have no purpose to tell the correct sound deeply so I do not mention more details. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Japanese has 22 consonants that are easy to pronounce. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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They are slightly different from the real sounds. If you know the exact sounds, please refer the other sources. I do not focus on the exact sounds as well as the sounds of the vowels in this article. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I am using Japanese Hiragana and Katakana font to display the following tables. You can get them without any special fee from Microsoft web site, http://www.microsoft.com, if you use Windows OS.
Japanese has two types of phonetic scripts which have the same pronunciation parallelly.
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Japanese has syllables that are plainly combined with a consonant and a vowel. The following list shows us the standard phonemes
The following list shows us the standard combinations
However, the following syllables are exceptional.
The following list shows us the real sound of the special syllables. The last letter ['] is usually omittable except before vowel and semi-vowel letters ( a,i,u,e,o,y,w ) if it is not ambiguous.
The following list shows us the sound and the Hiragana spelling of the 3 special particles
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This table shows us all the syllables that Japanese can use for loan words. You may choose the nearest sound that you want to pronounce from this table. The following list shows us some examples. The consonant [wh] is the same as [w]. It is provided due to the spelling distinction of KANA.
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These 22 syllables are sometimes spelled as the sequences in this table because of the historical reason. In authorized documents, they might be spelled with this rule. Furthermore, knowing these spellings helps you understand verbal conjugations of Japanese. In order to distinguish the spellings for real phonetic sounds from the classic spellings, the following real sounds are spelled with an apostrophe followed by their consonant and so no. However, there is neither official nor common rule to spell them.
This lesson does not use apostrophes for their distinction, |
Japanese has pitch accents whose types are high and low. It is different from stress accents that English speakers use. I express these 2 pitch as follows.
However, The pitch accent of Japanese has various different rules from each dialects and there is no uniformed rule except for occupations like an announcer. When I indicate the pitch of word if it is necessary, The pitch of words is based on Tokyo dialect. In Tokyo dialect, the pitch mark that expresses "low to high" can be omitted because "low to high" always appears between the first syllable and the second syllable of a word if the place between the syllables are not a position from high to low.
I introduce some examples.
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