Besides the grammatical aspect, Japanese is a tonal language. That is, the meaning of the words may vary according the tone and even the context, leading to more than 50 sounds that must be memorized.
While English allows us to string together consonants for as long as we like, Japanese has a bit more of a need for vowels. There are really only 133 sounds they can make. That sounds like a lot, but think of all the sounds we make in English.
Japanese also has pitch patterns within words. This is similar to, but not the same, as the way that pitch is used in Mandarin to differentiate words. While Mandarin has 5 tone contours, Japanese only has two pitches, High and Low, though they can be contrasted in many different combinations.
Japanese has a relatively simple sound system compared to languages like English and Chinese. Japanese has around 110 distinct syllables, formed by combining consonants with vowels or standalone vowels. English, in contrast, has a more complex phonetic system with over 1,000 possible syllables.
The Japanese language has significantly fewer vowels sounds than English. Japanese has only five vowel sounds: /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/ (あ, い, う, え, and お). These sounds are more consistent than in English because they are pronounced based on how they are written.
To make "r" sound, start to say "l", but make your tongue stop short of the roof of your mouth, almost in the English "d" position. It is more like the Spanish "r". The Japanese have trouble to pronounce and tell the difference between the English "r" and "l' because these sounds don't exist in Japanese.
They suggest that English /l/ is perceived as more similar to Japanese /r/ than English /r/ is, and hence it is harder for Japanese speakers to distinguish Japanese /r/ from English /l/ than Japanese /r/ from English /r/.
Then, looking at the horizontal column of place of articulation, there is a variety of fricatives and affricates which are much more widely distributed in English than in Japanese: /f/, /v/, /θ /, /ð/, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, /ʧ/, and /ʤ/ do not exist in the Japanese consonantal system.
Notice that several English sounds are missing from the Japanese language entirely: "c," "f," "l," "q," "v," and "x." When Japanese want to represent these sounds, they have to use Japanese syllables that sound almost the same.
Is Japanese hard to pronounce for English speakers?
Rest assured though that mastering the pronunciation of each phoneme is relatively easy. Coming from speaking English you will also find the vowel sounds easy to master. As a final bonus, none of the tongue gymnastics required in English are necessary to speak Japanese.
While both Chinese and Japanese are complicated in terms of writing, I'd say that Japanese represents the bigger challenge. Not because learning to read and write Japanese is harder, but because you'll need to learn a lot more than just a writing system.
It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide.
Japanese does not have the stress accent which other languages such as English have. That is to say, none of the syllables of a Japanese word are pronounced louder or longer than the other syllables. What Japanese does have instead is a musical pitch accent.
So although Japanese doesn't have tones, each word has a pitch accent, so it's important to use the correct pitches, or people may think you're saying one word when you mean to say another. In Japanese, there are only two levels of pitch -- high and low.
Taa (/ˈtɑː/ TAH), also known as ǃXóõ (/ˈkoʊ/ KOH; ǃXóõ pronunciation: [ǃ͡χɔ̃ː˦]; also spelled ǃKhong and ǃXoon;), is a Tuu language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world.
There is the Katakana character ヴ (vu), which is ウ with 2 dots on its upper right, but we have no Hiragana equivalent for that. That is because there are no words of Japanese origin that use this sound. This V sound has been written in Katakana using the letter ヴ for a long time.
Japanese people are very concerned about living harmoniously as a group. It is common sense that loud noise can disturb others, so they talk quietly in shared places. People also put their phones in silent mode and don't answer calls on the train or bus. It's not uncommon for them to warn others if they talk too loud.
Actually, there are fewer distinct sounds in Japanese than in most any other modern language with over 100000000 native speakers. There are 9 consonants with 5 minor variations on 4, and 5 main vowels that get lengthened and blended. That's fewer than half the total number of what we have in English.
The consonant sounds /r/ and /l/ are two of the most problematic sounds for Japanese students, being that these two sounds do not exist in Japanese. Furthermore, Japanese speakers often find it difficult to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ in English.
The rarest speech sound is `rÆ' in Czech and described as a rolled post-alveolar fricative. It occurs in very few languages and is the last sound mastered by Czech children. In the southern Bushman language ! xo there is a click articulated with both lips, which is written Â.
Lack of Distinction: In Japanese, the ``R'' and ``L'' sounds are not phonemically distinct. This means that both sounds are represented by the same character, which can lead to confusion when learning English, where these sounds are important for distinguishing meaning.
The confusion for many Asian speakers of English comes from the fact that often they don't make a distinction between these two sounds. This is because, unlike in English, in some Asian languages, the R and L are produced in the same way -- by a rapid touch of the tip of the tongue to the upper teeth.
Can Japanese people hear the difference between L and r?
japanese people don't distinguish between an ``R'' or ``L'' . it's difficult for japanese people to learn the phonetic difference because they are the same sound to the ears of japanese people.
