Japanese Pronunciation 101: Devoicing! / 日本語の母音の無声化について！ | Dōgen 

Could you tell me what each shirt caption says for refrigerator and chopsticks? The pictures are too small to read on teespring.

@@joesavag each reads: "I can even use chopsticks." and "Yes, I do know what each kanji character means; I love fridges."

Japan store when

Noooo, the hiragana hoody isn't available in M anymore. Guess I missed it.

Hey Dogen, could you talk a bit about aspiration? You mention that the only difference between た and だ was voicing, but when said on its own, た is also clearly aspirated. But it so often isn’t in many words.

草

i see what you did there

You're a genius

英語上手。

"Where's all the harem?"

"Sufiyan" allegedly, according to the subtitles. You're the best, Sufiyan!

His patrons are saints! Wait...

Well he's exaggerating anyway, and the subtitles are rubbish

@リード You're welcome!!

No swearing

Seriously “I want to help others, let me shell out some cash.” It’s amazing.

@@colin8150 , a lot?

@Dogen Do you have a video how the heck to be able to pronounce 7時 properly? All I can get is laughter when I try. If so I'm the next guy to pay to make that one public 😅

@@StevenBara sh'chiji. The "chi" sounds like it would in "chill", but with a very short i. The "ji" is pronounced normally.

*unvoiced heroes ;)

Keep going teach those kids well so they don't waste their childhood

Same here. But having it explained really let me put it together and realise I'm not going crazy.

I watched a native Japanese teacher video teaching about pronouncing loanwords in Japanese. She claimed that loanwords never devoice 'su'. Now I am highly suspicious that she doesn't realize the devoicing pattern in Japanese as detailed in this video. (She can speak English, but her English shows signs of lack of in-depth study like Dogen.)

@@ultracapitalistutopia3550 yeah, being fluent, being able to teach is two different stories.

@@FDE-fw1hd so true. and.. against popular belief.. getting an english degree doesnt automatically make a person fit to explain it to anyone.

your English is amazing :)

いいです。英語は大丈夫と思います。私がよく分かりました。 It's fine. Your English is fine I think. I understood it well enough. (Now I apologize if I made any mistakes in my Japanese. Only took 2 semesters in college and haven't practiced it in a while.)

The same phenomenon occurs in English as well (for similar reasons)! Some vowels get de-voiced in words like camera (e), Interesting (first e), favorite (o), comfortable (second o) and generally (second e)

うん。まぁ大体わかってたけど初めて知ったもんもあった。This video was indeed very intresting. Idk what I'm doing with my life

Sodesuka? そうですか？この「す」 ローマ字にした場合Uが加わることでナチュラルな日本語ではないとたいていの人は思うはず 関西の人はあまり母音の無声化は起きないけど

Then Why are you here just kidding 😀 don't take it seriously

@@PattheGamer I'm here for the dank memes and funny videos.

Seriously, I have very little interest in learning Japanese but somehow ended up watching Dogen more or less everyday. HOW?!

@@sabamacx oh gotcha

I first discovered Dogen through "Politicians in Japan", but when I saw these pronunciation lessons, knowing that his Japanese was good, I decided that it might be worth just seeing what I could learn about pronunciation in general, and boom, I had never noticed that CUBS / CUPS thing, but as soon as he gave the example of "cups", I knew where we were going with it. Also I don't know if he brings it up later but I read how the S shape we make for "see" is different to the one we make for "saw" (that is, the S changes depending on the vowel after it), and you can actually tell this if you stop yourself short of saying the word, so just make the S for "seeee" and make the S for "song" and you'll feel and hear the difference.

I always heard it in the katakana words, realizing it also happens in the other words was new, but obviously shouldn't have been, in retrospect.

I didn't realized I was doing unvoiced subconsciously til I watch this video

I did pick up on this, "shkatanai, not shikatanai" However, i thought that since katakana words are sound based in nature, they're always pronounced "fully", so i would pronounce アクセント as "akusento" (but i made an exception for スター because I heard it a lot)

Cool to know I'm not the only one! I think I already noticed on my first day learning japanese when they introduced よろしくおねがいします。 Listening is incredibly important to learning a language (cant say what youve never heard).

LOL

@@michaels3003 Lol I learned them all independent of each other, somewhat irked this isn't like the basis of dakuten teaching!

@@TomAndDan , I feel your pain 😏.

Americans don't teach which sound is voiced in school, really?

@@iMaxBlazer It's a safe assumption that if the questions begins with 'Does America teach...' the answer is gonna be no

Just went back, that's hilarious

comedy in the small things lmao 😂

He did not want to be a distraction?

@@michaels3003 "Ta-da!" being what magicians say when they do a magic trick

@@raccoola5089 , OK 😏.

For me, I really have no one to speak to, so I find myself actively listening a lot more, so maybe I have more of an intuition for a proper Japanese accent. It just makes sense to me too. I'm glad to know why it happens.

Same here too. I think watching anime helped with this unconscious intuition, but I'm not sure.

yeah i think its cause i watch anime 24/7 since i was a little kid. i never had to think about pronunciation.

good ear squad rep

@@krosisbh immersion based learning baby

If you’re a native speaker, everything is like “yeah, that’s obvious!” But when it comes to another language, it’s completely different lol

@@strangelf Many of the embarrassing english pronunciations from my fellow japanese are actually due to the opposite of what happens to foreign speaker's mistake. Many japanese speak English with pitch accents which is why they sound funny. Next time you find japanese speakers around you, listen carefully and you will notice...

Yes! Also in English, instead of devoicing, it's a process called vowel reduction, where we replace the vowel with the "schwa" vowel/sound. It's still voiced, which is probably why your Japanese friends feel "heavier" in English. Also, from a sociolinguistics sense, Japanese society is still very much binary in their gender norms. I remember during my linguistics degree looking into the phenomena that Japanese girls tend to speak with a higher pitch, compared to American female counterparts speaking English, because the Japanese girl wants to differentiate herself from the Japanese man as much as possible using her voice. It's also why I've heard that it's recommended as a girl to learn Japanese from a female, so that you can take on those similar nuances and subtleties

Tell me about it, it soooo nice 😌

Indeed, I cover this in detail in my series as well!

I've noticed this when hearing someone say ビッグニュース (Big news) in an anime once. I remember thinking, "that last "g" sounded more like a "k" to me."

@@Dogen perhaps it's time for me to subscribe to ypur Patreon then 😎

This is very surprising to me. I can understand a sound being devoiced if there are voiceless sounds each side of it, like in this video. And I can understand a sound being voiced if there are voiced sounds each side of it. But a sound being devoiced because there is a *voiced* sound nearby seems completely counterintuitive. Is there any actual explanation, or is it just a matter of, "Sorry, that's just the way it is!"

@@omp199 It's a consequence of Japanese phonology. Voiced geminates don't exist in the native lexicon, they only appear in loanwords. This phenomenon was first observed by Nishimura Kohei (2003) and has been studied in great detail by Kawahara Shigeto. It's been postulated that Lyman's Law, a fundamental principle of rendaku, might be the culprit, as Lyman's Law states that there may only be one voiced obstruent (in Japanese, an obstruent is any non-nasal consonant) per morpheme- this rule dictates when certain morphemes might become voiced in multi-morphemic words. However, if you have a word like /bag:u/, you have two voiced obstruents in one morpheme, so something's gotta give, and it should probably be the segment that's already phonologically dispreferred.

its almost like a "sh" tho... its a /ç/ sound

agree

試着室

kuds to you for noticing the dialectal differences.

yes!

👍

I literally call this the Sasuke rule if I have to explain why you drop the "u" in words to people.

Mind blown....

Same with Asuka. When i first watched NGE i thought she was Oska or Osca or something, until i actually read her name afterwards

can you give some examples?

@@alexamderhamiltom5238 行くか

30:35 Unvoiced consonants being k, s, t, ch, h and p. Now this is complete haha.

I thought it's just that you usually don't have a pause after きく. thanks for pointing that out

Oh thanks, I was wondering about that. I'm noticing it seems to happen for a lot of words ending on -ku like kazoku, niku, chikaku, tsuku, hiku and I believe even for hataraku.

You are correct about the T and D in standard English, but I am not sure how many people actually hear a difference when the T is not perfectly pronounced. People are mostly tuned to listen to vowels, I think.

This is certainly interesting information. I only heard the rule about the aspiration of /p/, /t/, and /k/ in English except after /s/ as an adult. I am a native speaker of British English, so I had absorbed the rule unconsciously as a child, and I was surprised to learn of the existence of aspiration in English when it was drawn to my attention. I have not learnt anything about aspiration in Japanese, yet. I hope to learn about these conventions at some point.

@@michaels3003 I'm not sure either, but I think native Mandarin & Korean speakers can easily tell the difference, because in these two languages we do make a clear distinction between aspirated consonants and unaspirated consonants.

thanks for explaining it well I noticed a difference when pronouncing 't' and 'd' unvoiced but couldn't articulate it well because I didn't have the correct terminology. And seconded that these rules do not always apply due to the region and also context of a conversation. Side note: The 'u' in 'Desu' can also be voiced in very specific circumstances depending on the personal preference of the speaker as well.

Oh dang someone beat me. I'm not sure if there are rules for aspirating voiceless plosives in English that are uniformly followed across and between dialects, because there is no phonemic distinction based on that aspiration (unlike languages like Mandarin where there is). It's hard to find examples with [t] because of the American English tendency to do other things to /t/ in the middle of words. It might be easier with [p], where it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of situations where it's unaspirated, although it may not be simple or universal. For example I googled to find out if the P in "apple" is aspirated or not and there seem to be people who say it is and people who say it isn't, and it seems like it's at least a *little* bit aspirated when I say it. In "application" however, it is more clearly unaspirated, as it also is in "stop", "capstone" or "ketchup".

i think you meant きさま rather than くさま but i got the jist

@@nahte- Oh right, thank you for the correction !

well, technically the "u" and "i" are still there, the shape of the mouth is still the same for "ku" and "ki", they change the place of articulation of the consonant, but they are not pronounced, you can notice that for kuso the "k" sound is in the back of your mouth, but for kisama it's in the front, right to your teeth...

@@Gadottinho Yeah sure, but depending on your native language, you need more or less efforts to hear it. For example I know russian has a similar idea with wet consonants, so I'm sure it's clearer for them. In my case, it's not something I can catch easily.

Oh, and let's not forget about ちくしょう, so common in anime and regularly pronounced chkshō

Amogus Sharingan

I love this comment! I’m Japanese and have never used the word handakuten in my life, it’s ALWAYS maru. Dakuten is used a bit more, but still 90% of the time we'd say tenten.

my teacher taught me chonchon/maru hahah

@@inari.28 haha I heard chonchon too. I wonder if it's a regional thing

Isn't Sushi's pitch accent LH? If so then it falls under that thing he said

@@PequenaNoobAmaPudim If only it were that easy. Pitch accent is on 'su' in standard Tokyo Japanese.

I think it should be"sshi", not "sush"

@@SK-bw2mm Well, again, pitch accent is on 'su,' but more importantly, it also isn't pronounced 's-shi.'

@@Ryan_gogaku actually from my accent dictionary Sushi can be pronounced as either スシ＼ or ス＼シ

着眼点が素晴らしいね

I feel like your reasoning could still be the reason for these rules. In the end, even if they're set rules now, the devoicing seems to just make the words easier to say, so basically make speaking take less effort and be faster. The 'rules' probably just developed over time and are taken from how people speak collectively (rather than someone determining 'We will speak THIS way.')