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

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Yep! Just a page later in the book he started going on about euphonic changes. It's doing my head in, because a book called "Let's Learn Hiragana (a self-study guide)" should, imo, involve a slightly different level of assumed knowledge than "Teach Yourself Hiragana (for professional linguists)". It's making me feel like an idiot because I don't know this stuff.

I looked at Wikipedia but could make little sense out of it. I know from looking at science stuff there that Wikipedia in general tends to assume that you already have a fair bit of knowledge on the subject - it's not a good place to get a beginner's overview. Doesn't help that the first page you linked to has been very poorly edited. Currently, it says:

In order to understand how sounds are made, experimental procedures are often adopted. For example, investigators measure how the tongue makes contact with the roof of the mouth in normal speech production by using a technique called electropalatography (or EPG). In order to collect EPG data, the speaker is fitted with a special prosthetic palate, which contains a number of electrodes. The way in which the electrodes are "contacted" by the tongue during speech provides phoneticians important information, such as how much of the palate is contacted in different speech sounds, or which regions of the palate are contacted, or what the duration of the contact is.

An interesting example of this is Japanese. It is derived from several different languages, however it did at one point in time have its own group of phonetics. “Hiragana” and “Katakana” being the original characters – then later the Chinese language and its “Kanji”(a type of writing system originally based off of visual pictures and objects). The influence of kanji is obvious in some cases - a good example being the symbol for "tree" which looks a miniature tree. “Forest” looks a lot like “Tree” in that it is 3 “trees” grouped together.

I am, uh, not actually convinced that hiragana and katakana have much to do with electropalatography :/

[trinker.livejournal.com]

*ARGH*

If that's what the wikipedia article says about hiragana and katakana, I may just have to go rattle some trees and learn to edit their pages, because this is patent *nonsense*. Hiragana and katakana are derived from kanji.