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Long/short vowels in Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5593 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 1 of 7 23 May 2013 at 5:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I:m currently studying for the jlpt (level 3) and one problem I keep having in practice tests is that I'm unsure whether a word would be e.g. どうぶつ or どぶつ.
It seems fairly random that some words have a long vowel and some have a short vowel. Can anyone give any advice for how I can try to remember the vowel length? Its just not something I'm used to in English and in other languages I've learned a little of it tends to be much more pronounced and rare. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4658 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 2 of 7 23 May 2013 at 5:46am | IP Logged | ||
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What helped me to deal with this problem is this: don't think of them as long vowels. Think of them as two separate letters pronounced together. It's not do-/bu/tsu, it's do/u/bu/tsu. Or to be accurate, it's actually said do/o/bu/tsu.
What I do is take the word and pronounce each letter slowly and separately. Do. O. Bu. Tsu. Then I say them faster and faster, closer and closer together until I get it. What helps is also clapping your hands each time you say a syllable. Each letter/syllable in theory has the same length. When you slowly say each syllable, clap. Then as you get faster and faster, you get used to the rhythm of the word. After that, it's just sheer memorization. You have to remember that どうぶつ means "animal" and どぶつ is... well... a Buddha statue made of earth? Edited by kujichagulia on 23 May 2013 at 5:48am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4150 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 3 of 7 23 May 2013 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||
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There were 2 things that helped me get used to long vowels.
The first was learning a lot of kanji and their common compounds. (Before I started really studying Japanese grammar, I had already learned about 500 Kanji and I think that this helped me immensely in understanding Japanese phonetics. While I wouldn't suggest doing exactly what I did, I see no harm in going ahead and learning some additional kanji.) Learning the characters behind the sounds allowed me to... well, associate those sounds to the characters. Knowing that ど is 土 and means "earth" and that どう is 動 and means "motion" allowed me to guess the length of a vowel even when I couldn't necessarily hear the difference at first. (Also, some words are really easy to remember because of their characters. Doubutsu was easy for me to remember when I realized it meant "move thing", and then since I knew the character 動, motion, it was easy enough to remember it had a long vowel.) The second was exaggerating their length. And I mean really exaggerate them! Doubutsu isn't just do-u-bu-tsu, but do-o-o-o-u-bu-tsu. It seems awkward at first, but I found that pronouncing them like this during the early stages of my studies helped me remember which words required a long vowel much more easily. You will have to shift away from this kind of pronunciation later on, but it isn't too difficult to do so. Once you learn more words and have exposed yourself more to the sounds of Japanese, the difference between long and short vowels will become much clearer. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4583 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 4 of 7 23 May 2013 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4547 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 7 23 May 2013 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know that I used to have this problem and I don't any more, although for the life of my
I can't remember if I did anything specific to address it. I think learning the kanji really helps. Even if you're trying to accumulate vocab without learning a lot of kanji, you should eventually develop a feel for it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4658 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 6 of 7 24 May 2013 at 6:51am | IP Logged | ||
Ah, thank you for the correction. I completely forgot about "mora". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| HopeTea Newbie Japan Joined 4082 days ago 37 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 7 25 May 2013 at 1:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I honestly think just listening to a lot of Japanese is a big help. When you can start to hear native speakers
speaking the words when you see them for example, you just start to get a feel for the words. So I guess I would say it just takes time. At least that's how it happened in my case. I don't remember doing anything specific, though I do agree with a previous poster that remembering them in an exaggerated way can help (especially with words you often get mixed up on). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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