moaning about my Japanese textbook

[baratron]

I would like someone to translate my Japanese book into English, please.

From "Let's Learn Hiragana" by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura, p32: "The pronunciation of the Japanese [r] deserves careful attention because it produces a sound not found in English. It might be considered a cross between [r] and [l]. This sound is articulated by saying [r] while lightly touching the ridge behind the upper teeth once with the tip of the tongue, producing a flap [r]. This constrasts with curling the tip of the tongue back to produce the retroflex English [r]."

Er. WTF? I already knew that the Japanese (and Korean) "r" is somewhere between English "r" and "l", but I can't make any sense out of the last two sentences in that paragraph at all. I don't think it would have killed them to have simply included some photographs or diagrams here :/

The book is also going on about unvoiced, voiced and semivoiced consonants. Now, I get that the unvoiced consonants are the regular hiragana, the voiced ones have a " after which changes the meaning (e.g. hi --> bi), and the semivoiced have a circle after (hi --> pi) - but I have no idea why they're called "unvoiced", "voiced" or "semivoiced"! It's just assumed that you understand those terms - which would be great, if this wasn't a teach yourself Japanese-type book. And I have a feeling even were I to look up all the terms in Wikipedia or wherever, I still wouldn't understand, as I understand all the words in "saying [r] while lightly touching the ridge behind the upper teeth once with the tip of the tongue", but still have no actual clue what it means.

Comments

[meirion.livejournal.com]

it makes perfect sense to me, but i'm afraid i can't think of any way to make it clearer :-/ what specifically doesn't make sense? "the ridge"? (if so feel for the ribbed bit of your palate just behind your upper front teeth).

-m-

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I have a fat, flabby tongue that doesn't move that way. The only difference between my "rur" and "lur" sounds is whether my tongue is touching my teeth or not. If I try to say "rur" with my tongue touching my teeth, it either comes out identical to "lur" or a meaningless rler sound that bears no relation to any language I'm familiar with.

I'm wondering whether my usual "rur" pronounced almost as "wuh" is good enough for this r/l hybrid, because it's pretty much the only r sound I can make.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Probably not.

In English, most of the sounds that involve "r" don't rhyme with words that involve "w". In Japanese, they certainly do. You're better off using an 'l'.