1.1. THE KANA 11
listeners, different people will pronounce the initial consonant in this col-
umn differently. While in many western languages the consonants ”d”,
”l”, and ”r” are considered quite distinct, in Japanese this distinction is far
less; any syllable starting with a consonant ranging from a full fledged ”l”
to a rolling Spanish ”r” will be interpreted as a syllable from the –column,
with the ”standard” pronunciation being somewhere between a ”d” and
an ”r”.
Not pronouncing Japanese
This sounds like an odd section title, but some bits in wriĴen Japanese are
actually not really pronounced at all. In fact, not infrequently you will hear
Japanese that does not seem to reflect the wriĴen form, with ”desu” seem-
ingly being pronounced ”des”, ”hayaku” seemingly pronounced ”hayak”,
”shiro seemingly pronounced ”sh’ro”, etc. etc.
In fact, many syllables with an – or –sound tend to have these
vowel sounds left almost unprounced. I say almost, because the vowel
sound is typically preserved by virtue of the consonants used. For in-
stance, the word ”soshite” is typically pronounced in such a way that it
can be considered transcribable as ”sosh’te”, rather than ”soshite”. How-
ever, forming ”sh” means also forming a pseudo-vowel sound. In fact,
even in this ”omiĴed vowel” there is room for variation, so that a ”sh” can
sound like it was supposed to become ”shi” or ”shu”, and it is this feature
that is exploited quite often in Japanese.
This leads to a small problem. Because it sounds like the vowel is
entirely missing, you might be tempted to mimic this sound, but ending up
genuinely omiĴing the vowel, because that’s what your ears – which are
not yet accustomed to Japanese phonetics – think is happening. However,
this also makes your Japanese highly unnatural, because to a Japanese ear,
the vowel is only mostly omiĴed, not entirely.
The problem then is one of hearing: when learning a new language
it is important to ”unlearn” how to hear language. Much like how we have
learnt to see the world in a way that it’s actually not (you will consider a
brown table with a light shining on one end, brown, instead of brown on
one end, and a completely different colour where the light is hiĴing it), as
infants we learn to disregard any and all sounds that don’t feature in the
languages we’re raised with. As such, remarkable as this may sound, we
unlearn how to hear things accurately, and instead learn how to map what
we hear to what we know the language is supposed to sound like. While
highly effective when learning a language, or a family of languages with
similar pronunciations, it’s disastrous when learning a language that has