Summary
Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.
The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.
It is a tricky language. Almost nothing in common with Indo-European languages except loan words. Completely different grammatical structure. Three different writing scripts.
At least the pronunciation isn’t too bad coming from English as all the usual sounds are represented within our phonology. Compared to Spanish rolling R’s, Russian and Arabic consonant clusters, Chinese tonality, and other difficult to pronounce languages.
Is what you’d think, but nope. Their r, sh, j, ch and w and u sounds are slightly different from English (enough so that some languages have the English version and the Japanese version as independent sounds), the lone n consonant has a pronunciation not existent in English, and Japanese has a tone system but it’s simple enough a foreigner can get by without knowing it. That is to say, Japanese pronunciation is very different from English and decently hard to master, but if you just pronounce it like you would English (without stress of course, absolutely don’t add stress) you shouldn’t have a problem getting your point across.
Wait Arabic consonant clusters? If anything Arabic has less consonant clusters than English. As a native Arabic speaker what I would think is a problem for English natives is the consonants themselves, because we have a lot of them and many don’t exist in English.
I am not an Arabic speaker at all, but one of the few amusing points of the Iraq war was that absolutely no one in the U.S. media could agree on how to pronounce Qatar. There were even segments on how to pronounce it. They didn’t agree with each other.
Of course, they never actually put someone who spoke Arabic on TV to get them to pronounce it properly. They probably couldn’t anyway considering the intelligence level of news anchors I’ve worked with.
Pitch accent isn’t a tone system, also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways.
If English speakers¹ can deal with oo being pronounced at least six different ways (moon, book, door, blood, cooperation, brooch) they should be able to deal with this…
1— Disclaimer: as a non native speaker, I not only can’t deal with it, but at this point have absolutely no intention to.
I mean according to Wikipedia,
And yeah ん is messed up but aren’t three of these the same sound? I’d say it’s more five different pronunciations rather than seven, which still a lot but would match with my understanding of it as English+2.
I think he titled it 7 because he explicitly presents 7 different cases. I’m not sure what you mean by saying three are the same though? Two are obviously exactly the same. Personally, I would only consider it three different “things”:
I think it’s fair to even say that it’s almost exactly one thing: an instruction to let air out of your nose whilst producing the surrounding phonemes.
I meant the same in terms of the actual sound that comes out.
Thanks for that.
Isn’t this just learning each word’s tonic syllable? Or if you mean the flow of a sentence, the general waving tone structure like in Spanish or French?
Neither. Japanese has two tones, high and low (for comparison Mandarin has 4 and Cantonese has I think 7), and each vowel/vowel+consonant in a word takes one of these two. For example there are a bunch of words pronounced koukai in Japanese and they’re split 50/50 on whether their tone is high low low low or low high high high, and the words oyster and persimmon (both kaki) are famous for having opposite tones, one low high and the other high low.
By the way Japanese straight up doesn’t have stressed syllables so the idea of a tonic syllable doesn’t really translate to the language.
You are correct (for standard Japanese 標準語 hyoujungo; other dialects can be quite different). NoneOfUrBusiness’s response is not a great take. Every word has an accented syllable or no accent at all (and it really is based on syllables, not mora). The accent is realized as a relatively sudden drop in pitch after the accented syllable with no (necessary) change in length or loudness. The drop can complete within the next syllable or after. Usually at the beginning of an utterance you start low, climb up in pitch to a certain point, and then either hit an accent and drop suddenly or gradually drop across a longer period of time if there’s no accent.
The precise pitch does not matter, and it’s definitely possible to have two accents close together resulting in a high-mid-low kind of pitch pattern.
Things are also complicated by the fact that Japanese likes devoicing certain syllables. Devoiced syllables can still be accented even though they can’t carry pitch in the same way as voiced syllables.
It’s not though? Pitch can and does change (either rise or drop) mid-syllable no?
Pitch does, but accent placement counts mora but only assigns to syllables. For example, if an accent pattern will put an accent mid-syllable, the accent will move further back to the beginning of the syllable. This is also why accents only occur on the first mora of a long vowel. You can also see this in action in accent placement for compound nouns.
Another good thing to know is that adjacent vowels within the same morpheme (typically one kanji) are part of the same syllable. So 帰る is an accented verb, so the accent goes one mora back from the end like with all accented verbs. But this would put the accent on the え in かえる, and かえ is one syllable here, so in fact the か gets the accent.
Edit: I was looking over my main source[*] for this, and was reminded of one really good example of the role of syllables in accent assignment: genitive の. Nouns can lose their accent if followed by の, and when this occurs is exactly when (1) the noun is at least bisyllabic, and (2) the noun’s accent is on the final syllable. Thus monosyllabic 本 (ほ＼ん) stays accented ほ＼んの, but bisyllabic 日本 (にほ＼ん) becomes unaccented にほんの, and 男 (おとこ＼) becomes unaccented おとこの.
[*] The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (1999), edited by Natsuko Tsujimura, published by Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
TIL. I apparently picked it up naturally but I feel for people who have to actually learn this.
Uhhh… ok dude. I really doubt anyone “has to” learn this, as long as they learn to hear pitch accent I’m sure anyone can pick it up “naturally”. I spend my time learning this sort of stuff because it’s cool and interesting.
Thanks for confirming. I don’t speak Japanese but my sister studied it for a few years, and according to her, teachers were always impressed with her perfect pronunciation. We’re both native Spanish speakers in an English speaking country. From what I gather, Japanese phonology has more in common with Spanish or Italian than with English.
It’s is often said that Spanish and Japanese pronunciation is actually very similar. I learn japanese, and last saw it when learning the vocab item スペイン語 on wanikani.
That vocab is Spanish as language.
I’ve never been able to hear a difference with the ch, sh, j, or w. Is there anything that lays out the differences? I’ve basically given up on feeling like I’ll ever be totally comfortable in the language anyway.
Oh, and don’t forget the f sound is also different from English. At least the vowels are pretty easy to transition to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology
Go to the Consonants section. There are lots of useful notes there, and you can also click on the individual consonants for more information, including how to configure your mouth to make the sound. “ch” and “sh” are tɕ and ɕ, “j” is dʑ at the beginning of utterances or after ん and is ʑ after a vowel, “w” is w.
Compare to English under the Phonemes section. “ch” and “sh” are tʃ and ʃ, “j” is dʒ, “w” is w.
I’m not sure if they’re neatly explained somewhere, but the short of it is that sh, j and ch are “smoother” than the English versiond. They’re literally just s, z and t respectively, with an i next to them and smoothed over for ease of pronunciation because otherwise it’s a pain to say “si” (languages that do have this sound, like English, have ways of coping with this, but Japanese doesn’t). In English the equivalent of this is how drink is actually djrink and two becomes chuu, but anyway the point is that thinking of these three sounds as coping mechanisms rather than independent sounds should help. Listen carefully to a Japanese shi and you’ll hear the remnants of an s in it. You’ll probably have some luck looking these sounds up on YouTube.
W is a bit simpler; it’s just uw instead of a plain W, in the same way the English version lets out a bit of air before the W itself. Just insert a small u before watashi to make it uwatashi and you’ll get pretty close. Again YT should help. BTW to help appreciate the difference, when the Japanese try to emulate the English W sound they add a ho first, as in howaito (white).
My strategy is watch tons of anime (or your Japanese media of choice) with English subtitles. As long as you don’t depend completely on the subtitles and try to listen to the words being said it’s a pretty effective way of learning the language in my experience. Simple manga (or, again, your Japanese written media of choice) also does wonders.
Edit: A bunch of stuff here is wrong, see below.
The stuff about “w” is wrong, but there’s a good reason you would think this. The lip shape for the “w” sound in English and Japanese is different; in English the shape is like English “u”, and in Japanese the shape is like Japanese “u”, but you definitely shouldn’t have an actual “u” sound.
I think, especially considering your comment about ホワイト howaito, that you’re confusing two things. There are English dialects which have two separate “w”-like sounds, one of which is typically written “wh” and the other “w”. (To my ear, this distinctiln also sounds old-fashioned.) In these dialects, “w” as in “water” and “wood” is pronounced like you would expect, whereas “wh” as in “who” and “what” is pronounced somewhat like an “h” sound followed by just-“w” sound. I don’t think the “wh” sound is used for all instances of “w” in any dialect; in fact, most dialects have just the “w” sound.
This is false, they only do this for “wh” sounds (and maybe not even for all of them). Counterexamples to your claim are easy: ウェイトレス weitoresu = waitress, ワット watto = watt, etc.
That… Is all true. I guess I was basically spreading misinformation.