Dogen
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Discussing Japanese phonetics with linguist Yoichi Mukai!
🕑 Added 2020-10-05 06:25:14 +0000 UTCGood afternoon Patrons! I hope that this post finds you well. A couple days ago I interviewed Yoichi Mukai, a trained Japanese linguist and faculty member in the Department of Modern Languages at Vancouver Island University. In this video, we discuss vocal-placement, fundamental frequency, hyper-correctness, and many other topics. I hope that everyone is able to learn from this interview! Thank you to Yoichi-san to lending us his valuable time and energy. Incidentally, Yoichi-san's qualifications can be found at his homepage, linked below.
I'd like to also let everyone know that I've also just updated Lesson 11 (the first Japanese Pitch-accent test) with native recordings, and also changed just a couple of the words in the video such that the test would be more practical; if you haven't taken the test in a while, now would be a good time to re-check your listening abilities!
As usual, if anyone has any questions or concerns with regards to this post, feel free to leave a comment below!
Best from Beppu,
Dōgen
Comments
Doug Urayama
It's interesting you say that because the origin of Indo-European language R's is from both Proto-Indo-European r and z.
Kelvin T Nguyen
For what it's worth, many languages map a z-like sound to the letter r. The most famous example is Mandarin Chinese
Dogen
Thanks for the tip!
Strange Guy
From a russian point of view - string of 'R's is easy to pronounce if you keeping air flow constant. I found that many english speakers tend to stop voice when pronouncing hard 'R'.
Dogen
Hi Danilo! I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to—can you tell me what you mean by 'being a big issue in Japanese'? Are you talking about it being difficult to understand certain dialects? Thank you!
Dogen
What a coincidence! Yes, he actually reached out to me, so as you can imagine I was very interested in interviewing him for the series!
Tyler Cochrane
That's great Dogen! I'm surprised you got in contact with Yoichi. I was a research participant in his work at the University of Alberta when I started my undergrad.
Danilo Janune
As you know, we have a lot of people speaking English in the world and in a multitude of accents. However, this multitude of accents does not appear to be an issue with English. Why would accent be such a big issue with Japanese? Would that be because Japanese has only 50 sounds? I never dared to count how many sounds English has, but I tried to count the sounds of my native tongue and I stopped when I reached 300. By the way, I have heard a lot of non-native speaking my native tongue and their accent are seldom a problem.
Markas
Very interesting topics
