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Japanese Pronunciation: Pronunciation Table of Contents
English Japanese Online Dictionary's Pronunciation Pages
Basic vowels | Combined vowels | Vowel practise | Long vowels | Silent vowels | Special consonants 'R' |
Special consonants 'R' with long vowel | Special consonants 'HU' | Doubling consonants | Commonly mispronounced words |
Japanese is a relatively easy language to learn to pronounce. There are 46 basic sounds or syllables. These are organized by vowel sounds into consistent groupings of 5 characters.
All of the characters have the same sound as their names. For instance, ま is pronounced MA and it's name is MA. This is unlike English in which all letters of the alphabet each have a name which may or may not correspond with their sound.
In Japanese it is rare for a character to have a secondary pronunciation.
Basic vowel sounds are easy to learn because they have one pronciation only.
The consonants have a similar sound to their pronunciations in English. They each have one sound only (with very rare exception).
The famous Japanese 'R' sound and the character HU (sometimes written in ROOMAJI as FU because it's pronunciation is a cross between an 'H' and an 'F' are the only area which poses any kind of pronciation difficulties for Western speakers.
There are exercises to practise all of concepts on the succeeding pages of this series.
