moaning about my Japanese textbook
Feb. 19th, 2007 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronI 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 04:46 pm (UTC)Ah. Well. Um. That's part of my problem. The base of my tongue doesn't move at all when I say that. The tip flicks forward to touch my front teeth during the l part of lurl and goes backwards a bit (like, maybe 1cm) during the r. At no time does it go anywhere near my bottom teeth.
This is probably why I can't say words like the place where beer is made or the noise a lion makes. (Richard finds my pronunciation of "brewery" absolutely adorable, but I will avoid saying the word to anyone else.)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 06:27 pm (UTC)Maybe you should start by figuring out how to produce other peoples' [r] sound and then you can interpolate the Japanese sound from there. :) Or maybe you could try to put together a homebrew electropalatography setup? That sounds like a fun project... well, except for the bit with the electrodes in your mouth ... which is pretty much the whole project ... okay, never mind.