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An Overview of

Pronouncing Japanese
& Introduction to Japanese Syllabaries

for people with no intention of learning Japanese

(Generally More Than You Actually Need To Know)

Spoken Japanese

Japanese words spelled in Roman letters are pronounced pretty much the way they look, but here are a couple things to note:

• Japanese words have no stress.
• I is pronounced very high in the mouth.
• Final U in words ending in SU and TSU is (nearly) silent.
• SI is pronounced like English SHI. It is sometimes spelled SI anyway. SH does not occur elsewhere.
• TI is pronounced CHI. It is sometimes spelled TI anyway. CH does not occur elsewhere.
• TU is pronounced TSU. It is sometimes spelled TU anyway. TS does not occur elsewhere.

Written Japanese

Since Japanese words spelled in Roman letters are pronounced pretty much the way they look, the rest of this page is devoted to a discussion of the two syllabaries used in written Japanese.

The Chinese Connection. Several nations around China, most notably Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, borrowed both writing and a large vocabulary of Chinese loan words during the glory days of China’s Táng dynasty (period 12, AD 618-907). Today Vietnamese is written with Roman letters (supplemented with tone marks and other diacritics), and Korean is written its own alphabet.

Kanji & Kana. Modern Japanese continues to use some borrowed Chinese characters (called kanji 漢字 in Japanese) in combination with two syllabaries, hiragana 平仮名, used for “native” words, and katakana 片仮名 used for “imported” words, including importations from English, but excluding importations already in Chinese characters. Words that are not understood to be natively Japanese or ultimately borrowed from (or through) Chinese are rarely written with kanji.

Kanji have stable meanings (at least outside of their use in proper names), but because they have been pushed into service both for borrowed Chinesee terms and for native Japanese words, many kanji do not have single "readings" (pronunciations) in Japanese. They will instead have one reading in a word borrowed from Chinese and another in a word that is not of Chinese origin. For this reason, one often sees texts with tiny kana beside or above the kanji to show the reader which pronunciation of the kanji is intended.

Persistence. Why has Japanese retained any kanji rather than using its syllabary exclusively? Here are some factors that, together, make up a probable reason:

• There are a LOT of Chinese loan words in Japanese, most borrowed over a thousand years ago. It would be very difficult to speak Japanese without using Chinese borrowings.
• Japanese has always been phonologically simpler than Chinese, so many Chinese loan words are homophones in Japanese even if they were distinct in Chinese.
• Most Japanese argue that one needs the Chinese characters to differentiate the homonyms easily. (From a learner's perspective, starting from the written form, one needs kana superscripts to differentiate the different "readings" of the kanji.)
• In other words, the kana disambiguate the kanji by showing the intended pronunciation, and the kanji disambiguate the kana by showing the intended meaning.
• It is true that both Korean and Vietnamese discontinued use of Chinese characters in modern times, but they are phonologically more complex than Japanese, and therefore have less problem with exact homonyms in borrowed Chinese terms.

It therefore seems improbable that Japanese kanji will go away any time soon.

The two syllabaries look quite different from each other, but both sets of graphs (letters) are derived by simplification from Chinese characters, usually with some relationship to the Táng dynasty Chinese pronunciations of the characters.

The following table shows the underlying Chinese source characters, with their modern Mandarin pronunciations. Comparing the kana with the Chinese, the resemblance is usually pretty clear. Note that in some cases the two syllabaries do not borrow from the same Chinese character; in most, they do.

Not shown in this table: The use of two small jots to the upper right of an unvoiced stop makes it a voiced one. The use of a tiny circle to the upper right of of any of the glyphs in the H row makes it begin with P instead. (Combining the circle and the two jots converts this to B.) Because Modern Japanese distinguishes long vowels and, in some cases, long consonants, some combinations of signs are used to signal this.

This table is slightly revised from information given in: Nakamura, T., 1964 Enciklopedieto Japana. Osaka: Kosmo. Pp. 84-86.