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.
@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 😅
I am an English teacher here in Japan... by analyzing my students English pronunciation habits, i was able to understand many of these rules through reverse engineering. This has made it much easier to understand both Japanese and Japanese English, and this video really helped me consolidate what ive been learning over the years. Thank you.
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.)
日本人ですが、発音していない母音があるなんて意識したことなかったので面白かったです。 Though I'm Japanese and usually speak Japanese, I didn't realize we sometimes lost some vowels. So your lesson is very interesting. (Sorry for my poor English)
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)
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 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).
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.
@@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...
omg, so this why some of my japanese female friends are confused of why when they speak English, they sound heavier. It's because when they're speaking devoiced consonant in Japanese they're doing it with head voice, thus they sound higher !!!
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
The devoicing you discuss here mostly covers the devoicing of vowels, but for the learners watching here, a handy tip to remember is that many voiced geminates in loanwords get devoiced *if* a voiced consonant precedes it. For example, a hypothetical word like タッグ /taggu/ would be pronounced [taggu] because [t] is unvoiced, but in our very real word バッグ /baggu/, the /gg/ becomes devoiced because the /b/ that precedes it is voiced, making バッグ being pronounced as バック [bakku]
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.
As a linguistics major this was interesting. A lot of it is stuff I already picked up on even before I started learning japanese , but it was nice to have it explained. You explained it really well! Especially for people that don't know anything about phonetics. It was well done. Also has a bonus fact: voicing isn't the only difference between t and d. There's also aspiration, which actually plays a bigger part in how english speakers distinguish the two. Without the aspiration on t, people will often hear it as a d. Thus while there is a voicing distinction, it's the aspiration that makes the difference.
You're totally right, I did devoice some words just by "mimicking" japanese pronunciation, but consciously I was totally unaware of that effect or that it was called devoicing. Thank you so much. Indeed this is extremely useful.
Very unlikely that you'll see this among all comments, but I wanted to thank you and that generous fella for making this free episode posible. This is an invaluable lesson and it will make a huge impact on my 日本語.
This drove me crazy when I went to Japan for the first time after my first year studying Japanese at university: words like "試着室" suddenly went from "shichakushitsu" to "shchakshts" in the mouth of native speakers haha I unconsciously deduced most of the reasons why it was, but your video explains it really well and fills in the parts I didn't understand, so thank you so much (and thank you Sufyan!)
tbh this lesson helped me realize why reading katakana is so difficult for me, because when i attempt to sound out a word i sometimes find myself getting caught up because it doesn't sound natural to me. so when i learn what the word is supposed to be, i naturally devoice when i need to because i already know the word in english
I found that devoicing occurs less often in Kansai region. they actually pronounce desu or masu as printed, which makes sense because they put a sort of stress on the su part.
i realised this phenomenon existed when a japanese friend said "hito" and it just sounded like hhhh-to. i was able to mimic the sound by sort of gradually rolling the tip of my tongue in transition from "hi" to "to" and squeezing the correct sound out. i think the meme of "japanese is the hardest language to learn" makes teachers dumb things down to the point that japanese actually becomes the hardest language to learn. its such a simple and elegant language in reality.
Saying だくてん also makes く devoiced. I tried saying it and I realised that I've been devoicing subconsciously. It feels HARD to try and force the voicing and this intuitive feeling really helps. I didn't even know I was doing something similar in English like with cubs! What a mindblow
As a Polish student I've been devoicing subconsiously already, but it's great to learn the exact rules behind it. I still have to grasp my head around pitch accents, but for now I'm gonna focus on not procrastinating when it comes to vocabulary. ありがとうございます！
It’s so crazy all of the things my Japanese Professor didn’t explicitly teach us, and when I learn about them in an explicit way I think “why didn’t she teach us this!” But by having us shadow every sentence she spoke I learned all of this implicitly. It’s really amazing.
15:15 - While comparing the devoicing of "い" in the "きぐ vs. きく" example, the きく also becomes an example of the ending "う" vowel becoming voiced despite technically meeting the devoicing rules, because of pitch-accent that he covers in the ending (despite not bringing this specific word back up again later).
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.
Thank you Dogen for this, and Sufiyan too for the sponsorship. Devoicing is something I kinda realized over my listening and speaking practice but never thought that this is actually a formally specified linguistic point. Again, thanks for the lesson.
This is so incredibly helpful. I'm one of those people who picked up Japanese from spending too much time consuming various Japanese media, and since I never went to school for it I struggle to explain why things are they way they are in Japanese. Because to me they just are. Devoicing is probably the most common things I end up having to try to explain when I'm helping out with Japanese. Having these rules is like hearing an explanation to something I "always knew" but could never articulate.
hehe this made me so happy. I didn't know this was a thing but i been doing it-- on accident!!! bam... motivation. That said, super happy to know it exists... I think I've been screwing it up when reading the first time around. I'll keep it in mind from now on... probably'll help me link my eading and my actual speech together better. Also, this definitely makes it clear how badly I should prolly get dogen's course. Will def do that once I get to a decent vocab level.
It's really interesting that you talk about how it's uncommon for this to be taught. My very first japanese teacher told us about i and u sounds sometimes being unvoiced and as i've continued learning i've felt that even though my general grasp of pronunciation was about on par with my classmates', I was usually always better at sounding similar to recordings of native speakers. A lot of comments are talking about how this came naturally to them because of their native language but as a spanish speaker (quick mental check tells me all our vowels are voiced) i definitely should pass this on to my classmates.
Wow, thank you Sufiyen and Dogen! As someone who’s semi-learning more for fun in my idle time on an app, this devoicing is lesson is the exact piece I was missing. It was frustrating not understanding why some words sounded like they looked, while others randomly didn’t. Now it feels like it all just clicked into place.
I sure hope after this video more of you guys will consider becoming a patreon. I guarantee that you get your money's worth 10 times over. It's even cheaper if you do the annual plan. Do it if you can afford it, I think he deserves the support for the all the hard work he put in.
I remember when I started learning Japanese and had very little knowledge of the language. I noticed when Japanese greeted friends after a long time they kept saying “sashiburi”, which I just mimic every time I haven’t met someone for a while. Many months went by without me realizing it was not “sashiburi” but “hisashiburi” (informal way). It was after I saw it written in a Facebook comment that it’s actually 「ひさしぶり」 I cringe thinking about all the people I greeted saying さしぶり🤦🏻♀️ Anyway, I’m happy to know the phonetic base of it.
I am a native Japanese speaker living in Japan, but this was very interesting. I think this is a complicated issue because devoicing occurs all over the place and even vowels after voiced consonants could disappear and some voiced consonants themselves could sometimes sound unvoiced. And of course we have dialects....
As a native Chinese speaker who also speaks some English and Japanese, I feel like it's worth pointing out that the difference between English T & D isn't just unvoiced v.s. voiced, but also that T in most cases is aspirated unless preceded by an S (well, for American accent both T & D become alveolar flap if appear in the middle after a vowel). On the other hand Japanese has some sort of conventions (depending on the area / accent /generation) for determining if an unvoiced constant should be pronounced aspirated or unaspirated, which I found that a lot of Japanese learners don't pay attention to.
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".
This is one of the most important videos I have come across in my years' journey of casual learning. Not so much for speaking but for *listening* to Japanese - I always wondered if I'd never catch on because at a certain point it sounded "too fast". Now I know not to panic when listening to podcasts 😅
My Japanese accent is native level (I grew up speaking Japanese) but I enjoy hearing these explanations for things that I do unconsciously. It’s difficult to explain or even notice things that you do automatically without an academic perspective.
This made SO much sense to me and I’m so glad you have released this now. I’m 3 weeks into learning Japanese and I had realised that some sounds get kind of missed on the ends of words eg. desu or hanashimasu. That made some sort of sense, but then I started seeing words like ashita and wakarimashita - I wondered why the “i” was missed. Then there was “roku sen en” that missed the the “u” sound. I couldn’t work out the pattern to what is “missed”. Thank you so much for making this video. The penny has dropped now and I get it!
26:35 I learned most of this naturally through immersion but the 30 minutes was worth it for this one part. I've wondered for so long why 来たis pronounced with such a clear emphasis on た even though it should be on き. For some reason I couldn't accept that the pitch accent would change just because of devoicing the first mora. Feels like a huge weight of my shoulders lol.
I never thought about this, but it seems I've been doing it automatically when pronouncing thankfully. I noticed that the consonants just didn't sound the same, but I didn't know the specifics of what I was doing differently. Interestingly, the devoiced consonant explains why I sometimes struggle with listening - e.g. when verbs I am ~familiar with are used in a different form/inflection and something becomes devoiced, the verb suddenly sounds foreign and I have to go back to check what was said. It also explains why I very often struggle to work out how to say an English word in the Japanese/katakana way and have to keep listening to the native and repeating it back - if the vowels always sounded the same this would be easy to do
I remember the first time I encountered devoicing. It was very early in my learning of Japanese: I was watching an anime and heard くそ and きさま for the first time. I was very confused by the fact that Japanese seemed to have a secret X consonant I wasn't aware of, haha.
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.
Hey, I've perceived devoicing as something easy due to the inherent speed/sounds of the croatian language, which has been really helpful in attempting to articulate devoiced sounds. Thanks for the video!
This lesson changed my life. I'd been devoicing sounds until now, but I'd never been conscious about it. It all makes sense to me now. Regarding devoicing and pitch accent, the first example of change in pitch that came to mind was the way 好き is pronounced in Kansai-ben. I'd always found it strange how the "u" sound was more noticeable there, and of course, it is because す is stressed instead of き like we're used to.
Now, I *know* the diacritic signs are "dakuten" and "handakuten", but ever since my university Japanese teacher told me they were known as "tenten" and "maru" that is what they will be in my mind by default, forever.
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 Japanese parents worried about my weird accent at the age of 6. I started to learn writing and it made me believe I have to pronounce every and each letter without devoicing. I tried so hard to speak like a broken robot.
Very thorough, and the outline font was a great visual. :) I had three random thoughts: 1) There's also devoicing for あ・お in a few cases, usually where the whole mora is repeated, like (お金が) *か* かる 2) There are also a few words like すし (since it was hanging in the background for half the video) that are almost never devoiced. (No idea why it's pronounced with a full [i], but I've personally never heard anyone say "sush") 3) Do people say "unvoiced" for sounds like /p t k/? I've only ever heard them called voiceless consonants.
I have a background in Linguistics but phonology and phonetics were always my weak points so this video was extremely helpful. This reminded me back when I was learning the word shukufuku (blessing) for the JLPT. I never encountered a word that I had such a hard time pronouncing before because I was pronouncing it in that “Japanese letters only have one pronunciation” rule. Once I started devoicing the necessary vowels, it became easier to pronounce and it honestly became one of my favorite Japanese words to say because of how nicely it rolls off the tongue
Man, thanks for making this video. I've been losing my mind trying to find someone properly explain this and now des vs desu etc. makes so much more sense.
Good to know the name of this phenomenon and the actual theory behind it, because intuitively I thought Japanese people just kinda cut down the *last* syllable to end a word faster, if that makes sense. For example "gozaimasu".
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.')
hey I'm a native speaker and let me show some extreme examples I could come up with 聞き尽くした k'k'ts'k'sh'ta ummm it's more like k'k'ts'kush'ta 木津市歯科医院 k'ts'sh'sh'kaiin (Kitsu-city dental clinic) -- maybe kits'sh'sh'kaiin or kitsush'sh'kaiin I also found an exception. If I say "cosine" as in trigonometric functions, I say k'sain , so コ ko can also be devoiced Another case of this is 姑息 kosoku -> k'sok , again コ ko is devoiced I tend to write romaji with devoicing reflected because I feel it makes more sense, btw more: キツツキ kits'ts'ki (woodpecker) --- I think this could be an outlier ピシピシ pish'pish' by the way in your background there is Sushi -> s-shi
this is extremely informative thank u so much dogen and especially sufiyan. i realized i was already doing these unconsciously based on all the native japanese-speaking content i've been consuming. but it made me want to improve my pronunciations better! i'll practice more. 👍🏻
The revelation about the dakuten exploded my brain up and into the atmosphere and it rained down on the soil that is my curiosity and then bloomed into awesomeness. I kinda knew that there was a relation between the corresponding sounds with and without dakuten, but holy moley...
![Eminem - Fuel (feat. JID) [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/t5H_CewqpKA/mqdefault.jpg)
Merch: teespring.com/id/stores/dogenmerch
Japanese pronunciation lessons: www.patreon.com/dogen
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.
man whoever paid dogen to release this publicly is a fucking king
"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
The English voice over matched Dogen's lip movements well.
草
i see what you did there
You're a genius
英語上手。
"Where's all the harem?"
Let's take a moment and appreciate the unsung hero(es) that pay to make these videos public!
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 ;)
I am an English teacher here in Japan... by analyzing my students English pronunciation habits, i was able to understand many of these rules through reverse engineering. This has made it much easier to understand both Japanese and Japanese English, and this video really helped me consolidate what ive been learning over the years. Thank you.
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.
Thanks to Sufiyan, it's an unintentionally great trailer for your Patreon course.
日本人ですが、発音していない母音があるなんて意識したことなかったので面白かったです。
Though I'm Japanese and usually speak Japanese, I didn't realize we sometimes lost some vowels. So your lesson is very interesting.
(Sorry for my poor English)
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
正直、文部科学省はこういう活動に広告費を出すべきだと思う
I'm not even learning Japanese and this was such an interesting lesson.
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.
My ears definitely picked up on this trend but it's cool to know there are concrete rules to this. Very cool!
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).
So... somehow I unconsciously do this without knowing why, "It just sounds right". Now I know what's really going on.
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
The dakuten indicating 'voiced' blew my mind.
LOL
@@michaels3003 Lol I learned them all independent of each other, somewhat irked this isn't like the basis of dakuten teaching!
@@Navybird , 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
I’m Japanese. I’m studying English pronunciations. It's interesting to see it from this perspective.
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...
omg, so this why some of my japanese female friends are confused of why when they speak English, they sound heavier. It's because when they're speaking devoiced consonant in Japanese they're doing it with head voice, thus they sound higher !!!
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
I like how he says ta da at 5:56 and disappears.
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 😏.
The devoicing you discuss here mostly covers the devoicing of vowels, but for the learners watching here, a handy tip to remember is that many voiced geminates in loanwords get devoiced *if* a voiced consonant precedes it. For example, a hypothetical word like タッグ /taggu/ would be pronounced [taggu] because [t] is unvoiced, but in our very real word バッグ /baggu/, the /gg/ becomes devoiced because the /b/ that precedes it is voiced, making バッグ being pronounced as バック [bakku]
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.
As a linguistics major this was interesting. A lot of it is stuff I already picked up on even before I started learning japanese , but it was nice to have it explained. You explained it really well! Especially for people that don't know anything about phonetics. It was well done.
Also has a bonus fact: voicing isn't the only difference between t and d. There's also aspiration, which actually plays a bigger part in how english speakers distinguish the two. Without the aspiration on t, people will often hear it as a d. Thus while there is a voicing distinction, it's the aspiration that makes the difference.
You're totally right, I did devoice some words just by "mimicking" japanese pronunciation, but consciously I was totally unaware of that effect or that it was called devoicing.
Thank you so much. Indeed this is extremely useful.
THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE
This hit my feed at the PERFECT time! My brain is expanding
Very unlikely that you'll see this among all comments, but I wanted to thank you and that generous fella for making this free episode posible. This is an invaluable lesson and it will make a huge impact on my 日本語.
agree
This drove me crazy when I went to Japan for the first time after my first year studying Japanese at university: words like "試着室" suddenly went from "shichakushitsu" to "shchakshts" in the mouth of native speakers haha I unconsciously deduced most of the reasons why it was, but your video explains it really well and fills in the parts I didn't understand, so thank you so much (and thank you Sufyan!)
試着室
tbh this lesson helped me realize why reading katakana is so difficult for me, because when i attempt to sound out a word i sometimes find myself getting caught up because it doesn't sound natural to me. so when i learn what the word is supposed to be, i naturally devoice when i need to because i already know the word in english
I found that devoicing occurs less often in Kansai region. they actually pronounce desu or masu as printed, which makes sense because they put a sort of stress on the su part.
kuds to you for noticing the dialectal differences.
i realised this phenomenon existed when a japanese friend said "hito" and it just sounded like hhhh-to. i was able to mimic the sound by sort of gradually rolling the tip of my tongue in transition from "hi" to "to" and squeezing the correct sound out. i think the meme of "japanese is the hardest language to learn" makes teachers dumb things down to the point that japanese actually becomes the hardest language to learn. its such a simple and elegant language in reality.
its almost like a "sh" tho... its a /ç/ sound
Saying だくてん also makes く devoiced. I tried saying it and I realised that I've been devoicing subconsciously. It feels HARD to try and force the voicing and this intuitive feeling really helps. I didn't even know I was doing something similar in English like with cubs! What a mindblow
bro your voice is so satisfying to listen to
Tell me about it, it soooo nice 😌
日本人としては、濁点をつけると「濁る音」と理解しているけど、ヴォイシング、ディヴォイシングでの説明によって、より音声学的に根源的な構造を理解出来たような気がして大変ためになりました。そうすると、関西弁の場合、「です」「ます」の「す」の音は、「u」の音もしっかりと発音しているという風に標準語との違いが説明が出来ますね。
As a Polish student I've been devoicing subconsiously already, but it's great to learn the exact rules behind it. I still have to grasp my head around pitch accents, but for now I'm gonna focus on not procrastinating when it comes to vocabulary. ありがとうございます！
It’s so crazy all of the things my Japanese Professor didn’t explicitly teach us, and when I learn about them in an explicit way I think “why didn’t she teach us this!” But by having us shadow every sentence she spoke I learned all of this implicitly. It’s really amazing.
めちゃくちゃマニアックだけど、重要なトピックですね！
流石です！
self studying Japanese from home and Dojen here is carrying me across the line with these videos. Thank you!
Is that Why Sasuke is called "Saske"?
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
15:15 - While comparing the devoicing of "い" in the "きぐ vs. きく" example, the きく also becomes an example of the ending "う" vowel becoming voiced despite technically meeting the devoicing rules, because of pitch-accent that he covers in the ending (despite not bringing this specific word back up again later).
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.
初めまして💓
私は日本の大学生です✌️
今、英語の勉強中で色んな動画を見ているうちに、この動画にたどり着きました☺️
語学の勉強は、本当に難しいと思いますが皆さん頑張りましょう😉💖
私も英語を喋れるように頑張ります✌️
Good luck!!
「ありがとうございます」を伸ばしたらsーーーーってなる現象はこれだったのか。日本人だけど気づかなかった。
8:33 starts here
Thank you Dogen for this, and Sufiyan too for the sponsorship. Devoicing is something I kinda realized over my listening and speaking practice but never thought that this is actually a formally specified linguistic point. Again, thanks for the lesson.
the way you broke it down was really nice, even a beginner learner like me could understand
ありがとう
This is so incredibly helpful. I'm one of those people who picked up Japanese from spending too much time consuming various Japanese media, and since I never went to school for it I struggle to explain why things are they way they are in Japanese. Because to me they just are.
Devoicing is probably the most common things I end up having to try to explain when I'm helping out with Japanese. Having these rules is like hearing an explanation to something I "always knew" but could never articulate.
hehe this made me so happy. I didn't know this was a thing but i been doing it-- on accident!!! bam... motivation. That said, super happy to know it exists... I think I've been screwing it up when reading the first time around. I'll keep it in mind from now on... probably'll help me link my eading and my actual speech together better. Also, this definitely makes it clear how badly I should prolly get dogen's course. Will def do that once I get to a decent vocab level.
It's really interesting that you talk about how it's uncommon for this to be taught. My very first japanese teacher told us about i and u sounds sometimes being unvoiced and as i've continued learning i've felt that even though my general grasp of pronunciation was about on par with my classmates', I was usually always better at sounding similar to recordings of native speakers. A lot of comments are talking about how this came naturally to them because of their native language but as a spanish speaker (quick mental check tells me all our vowels are voiced) i definitely should pass this on to my classmates.
Wow, thank you Sufiyen and Dogen! As someone who’s semi-learning more for fun in my idle time on an app, this devoicing is lesson is the exact piece I was missing. It was frustrating not understanding why some words sounded like they looked, while others randomly didn’t. Now it feels like it all just clicked into place.
This one video from Dougen has explained and answered so many of the questions I had while learning this language.
英語勉強中です。
逆に英語で日本語を学ぶと、自分でも気付かないこんな違いがあるんだな〜と勉強になります。
日本語ネイティブが英語の子音を習得する方が絶対不利だと思ってましたが、そんなこともないですね😇
I sure hope after this video more of you guys will consider becoming a patreon.
I guarantee that you get your money's worth 10 times over.
It's even cheaper if you do the annual plan.
Do it if you can afford it, I think he deserves the support for the all the hard work he put in.
I've just come across two words where I think this devoicing is applying to not just the vowel, but the entire mora.
洗濯機 【せんたっき】
水族館 【すいぞっかん】
nah, apparently this is something else called 促音化
I’m also super stoked that someone is FINALLY talking about the phonetics. Thanks man.
I remember when I started learning Japanese and had very little knowledge of the language. I noticed when Japanese greeted friends after a long time they kept saying “sashiburi”, which I just mimic every time I haven’t met someone for a while. Many months went by without me realizing it was not “sashiburi” but “hisashiburi” (informal way). It was after I saw it written in a Facebook comment that it’s actually 「ひさしぶり」
I cringe thinking about all the people I greeted saying さしぶり🤦🏻♀️
Anyway, I’m happy to know the phonetic base of it.
Now let's say it all togethet:
In Japanese, the high vowels い and う get devoiced when found between any pair of unvoiced consonants.
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.
日本人が見ても大変興味深い内容で面白かったです！👏🏻👏🏻
I am a native Japanese speaker living in Japan, but this was very interesting. I think this is a complicated issue because devoicing occurs all over the place and even vowels after voiced consonants could disappear and some voiced consonants themselves could sometimes sound unvoiced. And of course we have dialects....
母国語でも知らない発音の法則があるものだと、とても勉強になりました。素晴らしい解説ありがとうございます。
As a native Chinese speaker who also speaks some English and Japanese, I feel like it's worth pointing out that the difference between English T & D isn't just unvoiced v.s. voiced, but also that T in most cases is aspirated unless preceded by an S (well, for American accent both T & D become alveolar flap if appear in the middle after a vowel).
On the other hand Japanese has some sort of conventions (depending on the area / accent /generation) for determining if an unvoiced constant should be pronounced aspirated or unaspirated, which I found that a lot of Japanese learners don't pay attention to.
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".
This is one of the most important videos I have come across in my years' journey of casual learning. Not so much for speaking but for *listening* to Japanese - I always wondered if I'd never catch on because at a certain point it sounded "too fast". Now I know not to panic when listening to podcasts 😅
My Japanese accent is native level (I grew up speaking Japanese) but I enjoy hearing these explanations for things that I do unconsciously. It’s difficult to explain or even notice things that you do automatically without an academic perspective.
This made SO much sense to me and I’m so glad you have released this now. I’m 3 weeks into learning Japanese and I had realised that some sounds get kind of missed on the ends of words eg. desu or hanashimasu. That made some sort of sense, but then I started seeing words like ashita and wakarimashita - I wondered why the “i” was missed. Then there was “roku sen en” that missed the the “u” sound. I couldn’t work out the pattern to what is “missed”. Thank you so much for making this video. The penny has dropped now and I get it!
I feel like a genius for knowing this without hearing about it before but I still watched the whole video for his voice
Great video as usual 👏🏼
「ヒラガナ」ってカタカナで書いてあるの好き
26:35 I learned most of this naturally through immersion but the 30 minutes was worth it for this one part. I've wondered for so long why 来たis pronounced with such a clear emphasis on た even though it should be on き. For some reason I couldn't accept that the pitch accent would change just because of devoicing the first mora. Feels like a huge weight of my shoulders lol.
I'm low-key proud that I said it right when Dogen showed it for the first time. I tend to pick up stuff like this unconsciously
I never thought about this, but it seems I've been doing it automatically when pronouncing thankfully. I noticed that the consonants just didn't sound the same, but I didn't know the specifics of what I was doing differently. Interestingly, the devoiced consonant explains why I sometimes struggle with listening - e.g. when verbs I am ~familiar with are used in a different form/inflection and something becomes devoiced, the verb suddenly sounds foreign and I have to go back to check what was said. It also explains why I very often struggle to work out how to say an English word in the Japanese/katakana way and have to keep listening to the native and repeating it back - if the vowels always sounded the same this would be easy to do
I was struggling to say it right but when you spelled it "eek kah" it just worked. This was magic
I remember the first time I encountered devoicing. It was very early in my learning of Japanese: I was watching an anime and heard くそ and きさま for the first time. I was very confused by the fact that Japanese seemed to have a secret X consonant I wasn't aware of, haha.
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
Wow, 8 mins in and I finally have answers to things I’ve been searching for for what feels like years
Safiyan the king, paying for a whole-ass video to be published...
Perfect example of how we use unvoiced vowels is the word ''Sasuke'' , because no one actually says SA - SU - KE,but instead Saske, without the ''u''
カタカナでひらがなって書いてあるの見たの初めてかもしれない
Hey, I've perceived devoicing as something easy due to the inherent speed/sounds of the croatian language, which has been really helpful in attempting to articulate devoiced sounds. Thanks for the video!
This video also answers the infamous question "how in the world is that sound effect saying "Tatsumakispenpukiaku"?!".
The i's and u's are silenced.
Thank you, Sufiyan and as always thank you Dōgen.
This lesson changed my life. I'd been devoicing sounds until now, but I'd never been conscious about it. It all makes sense to me now.
Regarding devoicing and pitch accent, the first example of change in pitch that came to mind was the way 好き is pronounced in Kansai-ben. I'd always found it strange how the "u" sound was more noticeable there, and of course, it is because す is stressed instead of き like we're used to.
日本語教員試験に向けて勉強中のナンチャッテ日本語教師です。
母音の無声化とっても良く分かりました。
ここが試験に出るといいなぁ♫
Now, I *know* the diacritic signs are "dakuten" and "handakuten", but ever since my university Japanese teacher told me they were known as "tenten" and "maru" that is what they will be in my mind by default, forever.
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
ドゲン先生、ありがとうございます😊。
My Japanese parents worried about my weird accent at the age of 6. I started to learn writing and it made me believe I have to pronounce every and each letter without devoicing. I tried so hard to speak like a broken robot.
This is so helpful! Explains a lot. I never understood why gakusei always sounded like gaksei
Thanks Dogen and also Sufiyan ! now I finally know why SASUKE is read like : SUS-K
Amogus Sharingan
競技かるたで、「秋の田の～」の「き」は母音を発音してるけど、「秋風に～」の「き」は母音を発音していないから、それを知ってるとほんの少しだけ早く反応できるらしい
Always great seeing you.
Just finished my 2nd year of studies, I found this video very helpful! ありがとうございました！
そろそろ日本でもバズっても良いと思うんだが😊
I love your clips :)
日本人ですが、「行くか？」の例がわかりやすすぎました！ありがとうございます泣
I feel like I can finally explain to my friends why they pronounce stuff wrong
All hail lord Sufiyan-Sama for the generosity of making this possible. ありがとうございます スフィヤン様。
Very thorough, and the outline font was a great visual. :) I had three random thoughts:
1) There's also devoicing for あ・お in a few cases, usually where the whole mora is repeated, like (お金が) *か* かる
2) There are also a few words like すし (since it was hanging in the background for half the video) that are almost never devoiced. (No idea why it's pronounced with a full [i], but I've personally never heard anyone say "sush")
3) Do people say "unvoiced" for sounds like /p t k/? I've only ever heard them called voiceless consonants.
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
The difference between making the T and D sounds really blew my mind, thanks for putting this out!
I have a background in Linguistics but phonology and phonetics were always my weak points so this video was extremely helpful. This reminded me back when I was learning the word shukufuku (blessing) for the JLPT. I never encountered a word that I had such a hard time pronouncing before because I was pronouncing it in that “Japanese letters only have one pronunciation” rule. Once I started devoicing the necessary vowels, it became easier to pronounce and it honestly became one of my favorite Japanese words to say because of how nicely it rolls off the tongue
That was *so* good!! Huge thanks to Sufiyan for getting this onto RUclips ❤️
When did you learn English? You’re so good
Man, thanks for making this video. I've been losing my mind trying to find someone properly explain this and now des vs desu etc. makes so much more sense.
Good to know the name of this phenomenon and the actual theory behind it, because intuitively I thought Japanese people just kinda cut down the *last* syllable to end a word faster, if that makes sense. For example "gozaimasu".
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.')
This is probably the best I've seen on this topic. Well done.
I need an Italian version of Dōgen.
I need a chinese one.🤣🤣
saaaame
hey I'm a native speaker and let me show some extreme examples I could come up with
聞き尽くした k'k'ts'k'sh'ta ummm it's more like k'k'ts'kush'ta
木津市歯科医院 k'ts'sh'sh'kaiin (Kitsu-city dental clinic) -- maybe kits'sh'sh'kaiin or kitsush'sh'kaiin
I also found an exception. If I say "cosine" as in trigonometric functions, I say k'sain , so コ ko can also be devoiced
Another case of this is 姑息 kosoku -> k'sok , again コ ko is devoiced
I tend to write romaji with devoicing reflected because I feel it makes more sense, btw
more:
キツツキ kits'ts'ki (woodpecker) --- I think this could be an outlier
ピシピシ pish'pish'
by the way in your background there is Sushi -> s-shi
こんなこと考えたこと無かった
着眼点が素晴らしいね
this is extremely informative thank u so much dogen and especially sufiyan.
i realized i was already doing these unconsciously based on all the native japanese-speaking content i've been consuming. but it made me want to improve my pronunciations better! i'll practice more. 👍🏻
Nice
The revelation about the dakuten exploded my brain up and into the atmosphere and it rained down on the soil that is my curiosity and then bloomed into awesomeness.
I kinda knew that there was a relation between the corresponding sounds with and without dakuten, but holy moley...
Absolute legend the guy who paid for this!