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Koichi, has a nice video to help us with practicing saying the R sound, although without feedback I don’t know if I’m even remotely close. ;)
Still, I wonder if I’ve come across another problem with Rs in Japanese that I hadn’t previously considered. Just now I had a hard time finding a word I was hearing on a Japanese TV show. Eventually I found it, and it had an R sound in it. At that point I realized, the words I tend to spend the most time trying to look up have an R sound in them. I’m just not as likely to hear those sounds until I’m made aware of them. I wonder if this is because the Japanese R is just different enough from the English R that may brain auto-filters it as noise?
I’m curious does anyone else have similar experiences or have any insight on to if this is normal? Any advice on working around this?
Lets just say I felt 驚き （おどろき） when this occurred to me. ;)
This thread may be of some use to you http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/confustion-over-the-pronunciation-of-%E3%82%8A/
There is some good stuff there on pronouncing R, but not really any talk on hearing it, or if not hearing it common.
Looking back on your early days of learning Japanese do you recall if R sounds eluded your ears more than other sounds?
To be honest, I haven’t done much listening to native material aside from TF content. But in that case, I already know what’s going to be said beforehand. One way to work out what’s being said, is to think if it’s a word you already know and go over in your mind if it has an r sound in it. Then you can decide by the sentence what the word is. It might not work all the time but it’s worth a shot.
Some of the older members here may be able to give you a better answer. I’m still early days in my studies. Approaching 4 months almost.
Just out of curiousity, I YouTube’d “Japanese r sound” and came across this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHYhaa2w_C8I can hear alot of different ways Ryu is pronounced. One sounds like Ryu said really quick and you can just about hear the r sound. Another sounds like Yu with almost no r sound detected. Another sounds like Ru and the y is dropped.
With many different pronounciations, this does get confusing sadly.
I don’t really have any problems with the sounds because there’s not anything else in Japanese that sounds similar to them. Pronunciation wise I think it’s pretty trivial to worry about them, the only issue is if you pronounce it with a hard R like you would for “Rat” only then can I see a Japanese person MAYBE having difficulty understanding, but even then I reckon they’d understand you.
I remember initially being confused over whether or not it’s meant to be an ‘L’ or closer to an ‘R’ but then I just realised it’s up to the speaker, also music more often than not heavily leans towards ‘L’.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by
Luke.
@Yggbert – You didn’t find your brain skipping over the R sound as noise then?
@Kanjiman8 – Point well taken. That video was a good example. I suppose it goes back to my original theory then, but from the perspective of pattern matching, not noise reduction. I know the brain is really good as filtering out stuff it considers noise. That is to say the shear volume of information our senses gives us needs to be pruned for only meaningful stuff. The brain has to make snap judgements, and it leans towards the familiar. Japanese is still not familiar by the brains standards, so it filters more than I want it to. Meanwhile, the brain is also really good at pattern matching. To a Japanese person who is familiar with all of the patterns, pronouncing the same word differently isn’t going to interrupt understanding, and will likely go unnoticed. To me however I’m hearing what is being said because I don’t have enough context and experience to fill in the blanks automatically.
All of this adds up to my inexperience hurting me in two important ways. That is, the normal strengths of the brain are currently weaknesses.
AnonymousBy za whey I’m pretty sure Koichi did a video explaining how to practice R sounds.
Or not, that’s also a possibility.
Bbvoncrumb:
By za whey I’m pretty sure Koichi did a video explaining how to practice R sounds.
Or not, that’s also a possibility.Hehe, he did. That’s why my opening statement in the OP mentions it. ;)
AnonymousI DUNT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT GOODDAYSIR
Bbvoncrumb:
I DUNT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT GOODDAYSIRHEHE, SORRY, FORGOT MY CAPS!
READ OP FOR DEETS!
;p
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This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by
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