PG005

10 Pronunciation

Consonants

Consonants are pronounced the same as in English, with the following exceptions:

f where T, sometimes romanised as ‘h\ appears in romanised Japanese it should be pronounced much lighter than in English - the easiest way to approximate this Japanese sound is to purse the lips and blow lightly g if a word starts with a ‘g’, it is given a hard sound as in ‘goaT; In the middle of a word it is often nasalised as ‘ng’ n given a morę nasal sound than in English when it occurs as a finał consonant - otherwise like the ‘n’ in ‘no’ r pronounced with the tip of the tongue ąuickly

touching the ridge just behind the upper front teeth; somewhere between an ‘1’ and an Y s always given a hard sound as in ‘saw’

Double consonants are pronounced as separate syllables. kissaten (coffee shop), for example, is pronounced as kis-saten.

Grammar

Word Order

Unlike English, where the word order is subject-verb-object, the word order of a Japanese sentence is subject-object-verb. In other words, while in English we would say:

Who hit the bali?

a Japanese would say the equivalent of:

Who the bali hit?

In speech, unnecessary words are omitted from the sentence. The Japanese rely upon the listener to determine the meaning by context. Often the verb phrase is all there is to a sentence, leaving the listener to figurę out who is being talked about.

Verbs

The verb is the most important part of the sentence. The Japanese penchant for omitting superfluous information often leaves the verb clause as the entire sentence. Verbs remain unchanged no matter how many people are being talked about. Thus ikimasu can mean: I go, you go, he (she, it) goes, we go, and they go.

Politeness

Japanese verbs take endings that express politeness. The addition of masu to a verb makes it both morę polite and,

11