but what about 姪

@ED-yy4te

Жыл бұрын

Meh

@caioellery9117

Жыл бұрын

wait wait wait does the い actually sound like an い? I thought for sure it'd be pronounced めー lol

@monotonehell

Жыл бұрын

I before E except ...

@shylectre

Жыл бұрын

You just do a goat sound

@kanuakinya7588

Жыл бұрын

@@caioellery9117 yeah, This is because it used to be two words. め meaning female and い, meaning nephew. The male version of the word 甥 uses お to denote male.

"Every language is very logical and straightforward, except for when it isn't"

@nasis18

Жыл бұрын

Most true statement ever.

@Archedgar

Жыл бұрын

Spanish. It's 100% consistent and BTFOs every other language in that regard thanks to *the Royal Spanish Academy* (RAE).

@amauriherrera6022

Жыл бұрын

Spanish It has very few irregularities grammar wise so they are super easy to remember. As for phonetics its solid asf - you can learn to read and speak in maybe a day. You won't understand the meaning of words because you have practiced vocabulary though. Only caveat is (ci, ce,) the C with those vowels goes soft and Qu the U is mute, H is always mute. That's it, those are the phonetic irregularities of Spanish. Grammar is like playing with Legos base meaning stays consistent and you just change beginning or endings of phrases. There are irregularities but they seem obvious once you dabble in Spanish.

@me0101001000

Жыл бұрын

German too

@deanchur

Жыл бұрын

@@amauriherrera6022 And yet every car KZreadr still pronounces Murciélago as Merseelaaaago.

This teacher character is the best. I love how he always tries to explain stuff instead of falling back to droning the same rule over and over.

@henryxyz1

Жыл бұрын

SHUT UP AND JUST MEMORIZE THE EXCEPTIONS

nihongo wakarimasen

@cheezorger

Жыл бұрын

no keigo, nihongo wakaran

@user-cf3jy7wk2s

Жыл бұрын

Boku mo ne

@rin_etoware_2989

Жыл бұрын

wakaruuu

@amsyarzero

Жыл бұрын

nihongo o wakarimashita, soshite biideo o mimashita, nihongo o wakarimasendeshita

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

Nihongo jōzu!👏🏻

Damn. Thomas-san is the most obedient(and attentive!) student amongst any I've ever had the... pleasure to interact with. Can we all be a bit more like Thomas please?..

@ProfKisuto

Жыл бұрын

He absolutely needs to become a staple haha

@shafwandito4724

Жыл бұрын

I am that annoying student who always ask like "but wait, there's this right?" or "Then, what about this?" to the point that I can drag my question into 10 minutes long session...

@dahyimi2185

Жыл бұрын

No, please, don't be like Thomas. Use a bit of common sense. If え+い becomes えー, that obviously doesn't apply to adjacent words or compound words.

@calendar6526

Жыл бұрын

He is using math, even sensei can't argue against that and instead keep changing the rule.

@NixoLP

Жыл бұрын

Well alright then

When you can feel the jōzu slipping through your fingers.

@wiandryadiwasistio2062

Жыл бұрын

congratulations, you have been demoted from 日本に来てどれくらいですか？ to 日本語上手ですね！

I currently teach English in Japan and I get these questions every day about English words. Usually after a while I just end up saying "English is weird, I don't know."

@nicholasmitchell4717

Жыл бұрын

The actual answer is, "English is secretly four languages standing on top of each other, wearing a trench coat, trying to get into a movie with a single ticket."

@Mr.Sax.

Жыл бұрын

English is a mixture of Old Germanic, Latin and Celtic languages, it also had heavy influence from Old Norman and it also doesn't have an academy governing its rules, that's why it's a mess compared to some languages.

@j_m90

Жыл бұрын

Sounds like you're not qualified to teach English then XD

@eric1800es

Жыл бұрын

Yeah. I learned a new one recently too. Sometimes the same word got introduced to English twice. Sometimes both times from French. But the French meaning changed between :). English is hilarious.

@CC-xr7mo

Жыл бұрын

​@@Mr.Sax.don't forget the influence of French.

I got first place in a Japanese speech contest today between 6 different schools. I did it on Japanese pitch accent that I learned from your videos and patreon lessons. Thank you!

@dogchaser520

Жыл бұрын

Grats!

@riku5543

Жыл бұрын

:o I watch your videos!

@Dogen

Жыл бұрын

すごい！おめでとう！

@x3non500

Жыл бұрын

Hey congrats! It's kind of funny, I just finished watching your video on party games and now I see you in the comment section of a Dogen video xD You are both great youtubers, keep it up ヾ(•ω•`)o

@harshsrivastava9570

Жыл бұрын

@@Dogen 貴方がおうを忘れた

母国語なのに見ていてこんがらがってきて、ちゃんと話せるか自信がなくなってきたｗ

@ayszhang

Жыл бұрын

普通に会話したり話したりできても、規則を説明できるには限らない

@levi7581

Жыл бұрын

If you as a native are getting confused... as a non native beginner learner of japanese... I am very scared

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

@@levi7581 And rightly so 👍🏻

@raven.petrichor

Жыл бұрын

@@levi7581 as adrian said, even if you are fluent or a native speaker of a language doesn't mean you can explain the rules (since most are just intuitive after a certain point, so having to quantify them to someone who doesn't have the same instinct for the rules is hard)

@TheNameIsNobody

Жыл бұрын

​@@levi7581 Just think about it in your situation, you can fluently speak your native language but probably can't explain half the rules of it's grammar and just naturally speak. It's nothing to be scared of, it's just practice.

時々いつも同じ風に発音されますが "60% of the time, it works every time"

@saboruchan

Жыл бұрын

基本的にですね、Basically, yes 😅

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

適当な説明👌🏻

So it doesn't matter what language it is, they always try to bamboozle you with their contradicting rules. Poor Thomas, he was too good as a student xD

@martinajohnson

Жыл бұрын

The problem is that it's difficult to describe a language using rules!

@aoitamashii

Жыл бұрын

I was always told learning Spanish as an English speaker is quite easy because of all the loan words... then I took 3 years of Spanish in HS and found out there are like 10k different irregular verb endings you basically need to memorize. Easy, my foot.

@morzathoth919

Жыл бұрын

Every language is stupid in its own way, some like pretending that they are not and sure it is easy to look logical next to the absurdity that is english vowels, but no language is without dumb stuff and it is easier to just accept that.

@yhwh5568

Жыл бұрын

that's why my language learning method is always to memorize the rules and forget about them. worked well enough for english and japanese. tho i can't say i'm jouzu.

@yin2586

Жыл бұрын

@@aoitamashii don't forget the genders of things.

This needs to be at the beginning of every Japanese beginner textbook. The rigidity induced from following such rules causes tremendous delays in natural sounding language and can even make it difficult to acquire new words because students aren't "hearing" the sounds that aren't present in a given word....I'm sure there's a more eloquent way to say that....

@phen-themoogle7651

Жыл бұрын

True, but it might also overwhelm beginners since there's a lot of exceptions to the rules. There could be a whole textbook on this topic alone, and there probably are some. But they are more advanced.

@ayporos

Жыл бұрын

@@phen-themoogle7651 It's probably pointless trying to drone out and rote remember all the exceptions and rules beforehand. As it is with Japanese, as it is with English, and any other language no doubt, the best way to learn is to just 'do it'. English pronunciation is a complete cluster fuck. Yet having spoken English for over 2 decades now (non-natively) I feel completely at ease with it.. and I don't remember a SINGLE English pronunciation rule nor any of the undoubtedly vast collection of exceptions. Hell, I can't think of a single pronunciation rule or exception for my own native tongue... And I'm pretty sure I speak that at a native level. XD

@phen-themoogle7651

Жыл бұрын

​@@ayporos Exactly! I don't remember rules for Japanese or English either but I speak both, same for 2 decades for me on both languages or more for English though lol

@jonathanyehezkiel2528

Жыл бұрын

as a new learner i believe currently i "don't need this yet" because i can hardly make a full sentence yet to communicate, so there's no point learning how to speak "properly" when you can't make any sentence to speak.

@nutelu3462

Жыл бұрын

If you hear the language enough, which you should if you're learning it, you can probably pickup these pretty easily (desu = des, mashita = mashta, ei = ee, ou = oo and whatever other things there are)

最後の「基本的に、時々、いつも同じ風に」ってとこが好きｗ

"Japanese characters are always pronounced the same way" は: Hold my beer

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

*hold my moras

@TTTKKKOOO000

Жыл бұрын

へ：he?

@Mr_Mellowz

Жыл бұрын

@@TTTKKKOOO000 を

@TheWaterMiners

Жыл бұрын

​@@Mr_Mellowz well を is essentially always pronounced the same unless you're singing

@Mr_Mellowz

Жыл бұрын

@@TheWaterMiners so not always, which was the point

They are always pronounced the same until they are not. That's the rule.

I'm certainly nowhere near as much of an expert as Dogen in these matters, but it seems to me that the reason for pronouncing the い in 受け入れました is actually not "because it's in a verb" but more specifically because it is at the beginning of a separate component of what is basically a compound word (受け + 入れました). This is also indicated by the transition from hiragana into kanji in the written form, which implies a conceptual (and linguistic) separation between the first and second parts of the word (between the え sound and the い sound). い is pronounced as an extended え when it _is tacked on to the end of_ some sequence involving え, but in this case the い sound is not being _added to the end_ of 受け, it is actually _the beginning part_ of 入れる, and thus should be pronounced the same way the い is pronounced in other uses of 入れる. But it is also not really true that い following え (even at the end of words, etc) is always pronounced as a long え, IMHO. In my experience, it's a lot more nuanced than that, and can depend a lot on the particular word, the context it's being used in, and the individual speaker. It is generally true that え followed by い are not pronounced as distinct morae (so that is almost always wrong), but instead almost always merged into a single syllable, but what that syllable ends up sounding like can sometimes be ええ, sometimes be えい, or somewhere in between (えぃ, ええぃ, etc).

@ThomasNing

Жыл бұрын

Agreed, the first 2 paragraphs are what I was thinking. In other words, you'll figure it out eventually on accident XD

@solarrain1176

Жыл бұрын

Also because it is a kun-yomi word， since the rule え→い only apply to on-yomi words when え　and い are in a single kanji.

@themelessly

Жыл бұрын

I’m Japanese and that’s what I thought too. (I’m not a linguist though.)

@Ana0bella0goth0fox

Жыл бұрын

The long ええ sound for what we now write down as えい is a remnant of various similar-sounding long Chinese vowels. To add onto that, according to some linguists, Old Japanese did not seem to have a long-short syllable distinction at all. Therefore, differentiating it by onyomi and kunyomi should be enough (eg. if it's onyomi/chinese, it's probably pronounced as a long ええ; if it's kunyomi/japanese, it never could've been long in the first place, so the え and い are meant to be separate). Unless there are some exceptions that I'm not aware of.

@ChaoticLifemaker

Жыл бұрын

@@Ana0bella0goth0fox There are always exceptions... always

At 0:49, I love how when Thomas says でも先生は, he still separates the せ and い sounds in 'せんせい’ because he's still diligently attempting to articulate every sound. It mirrors the way he said 学生 earlier, but the video doesn't draw attention to it, just leaves it up to the viewer to spot it. I love the attention to detail with stuff like this, it's subtle but genius.

@ChosenHandle-Likethis

Жыл бұрын

I didn't think of it until you said it.

@_P2M_

Жыл бұрын

Oh, so that's what that was. I thought he said でも先生いは and I was trying to figure out what the い was supposed to mean.

laughed my ass off watching this and realizing how many nuances are in the language. i think i must've just picked most of them up listening to japanese audio sources (e.g. the silent い after 学生 and the 規 in 規則, but not the 入 in 受け入れました) give it to dogen to make me reconsider everything i know about my japanese ability

@matzekatze7500

Жыл бұрын

It's really funny yeah but the pronunciation of い in that verb is not that big of a deal when you think about it because It's just the verb 入れる but depends on how you see it😂

@wiandryadiwasistio2062

Жыл бұрын

wait until this blows up grass *look at the word ‘grass’

The first time I heard a native Japanese speaker pronounce 失礼します I knew everything I learned about pronunciation was a lie. I've heard stu-reishimasu, tsu-reishimasu, hitsu-reishimasu, su-reishimasu... I'm convinced any hiss sound + reishimasu will work.

@ilia321

Жыл бұрын

It doesn't even need masu. Tsresshass.

@thaibinh1909

Жыл бұрын

But it's interesting that Japanese people can't differentiate these sounds like foreigners. My teacher even considered there was no different in N and M of ん when my classmate pronounced them

@ayszhang

Жыл бұрын

you mean reh-shmas 😂 the u after s is not pronounced

@josesanmiguel9212

Жыл бұрын

Same with 会議室. I swear I've heard "kainitsu" instead of "kaigishitsu".

@MrBejkovec

Жыл бұрын

@@ilia321 After some time in Japan 'hass-u' is enough.

I know it's comedy, but this is also perfect example of why language needs to be obtained unconsciously through input rather than remembering and applying rules.

This is why experience with any language is essential. In Japanese, the best way to learn how to speak it is to remember how a native speaker says something and just repeat it that way. That is how I learned English as well. I watched a lot of TV and listened to native speakers when starting to speak English then I just repeated what I remembered others saying exactly how they said it. I had no idea what the rules were, but it really helped me learn the language.

@Adam-vx6to

Жыл бұрын

Absolutely. Living in Japan and being forced to speak Japanese every day will quickly improve your ability to remember these strange rules.

@moyga

Жыл бұрын

Yeah I think thats how everyone learns every language, not by learning rules but by just copying, then mixing and matching. Personaly though, I can read whole books in Japanese but it doesnt mean I will remember any of the sentences when it comes time to speak. The language parent situation is ideal but hard to create.

@moyga

Жыл бұрын

@@Adam-vx6to How do you get into that situation when youre a beginer learner though? Most foreigners who live in Japan don't need to use Japanese in their jobs or daily life except for pointing at things on restuarant menus and saying they don't need a receipt. It can be a catch 22 sometimes, because if you work in a Japanese company then you'll need to use Japanese every day, but to get that job you usually need to already be fluent.

@Adam-vx6to

Жыл бұрын

@@moyga you can work in Japan as a English teacher and simply find Japanese friends who speak little English

@moyga

Жыл бұрын

@@Adam-vx6to That isn't being forced to speak Japanese every day though. That would be forcing yourself to try to meet people every day after work. You could try to do that in your home country too or just using an App. It would work better if you came to Japan already around N3 level because people who know 0 cant talk and the Japanese people end up just swapping to English or don't want to talk. But yeah it also doesnt work well for people who enjoy talking about more complex topics, are less extroverted etc. its not that easy to make friends as an adult working full time in general even if you're good at Japanese because most older people are busy so thats one of the reasons a lot of people living in Japan never learn Japanese. Moving to Japan wont help that much for a lot of people.

I'm an English teacher who teaches Spanish children. I go through this on the daily.

@holliswilliams8426

Жыл бұрын

my condolences

@muttlanguages3912

Жыл бұрын

Ah, but English has no rules. Just vague suggestions

@infernaldisdain8051

Жыл бұрын

@@muttlanguages3912 English has many rules, but like all languages it’s important to know that the rules may be broken on occasion.

@DavidCruickshank

Жыл бұрын

@@infernaldisdain8051 yeah ..... "on occasion." 🙃

@Medivh73

Жыл бұрын

@@DavidCruickshank on multiple occasions

As Japanese native, I've thougt that each ひらがなs are pronounced the same way. But it's true that sometime we omit(skip) some characters(sounds?) like "えい" → "え". It might be something similar to shortened word like "going to" → "gonna" ( I'm not sure thougt) I was a bit confused about sentence "the い here is after a け. So it should be pronounced as え." That's because "け" have "え" sound in it, right!? I haven't paid attention that "け" have "e" sound in it. I always recognized "け" as "け", not "ke". Also, I didn't notice that "き" in "きそく" is pronounced as "k"(without "i" sound). I always thougt I'm pronouncing "きそく" as "kisoku", but maybe I was wrong 😂 I'm happy and honoured that a lot of people are trying learning Japanese even if it's hard. Hope you're doing well! 日本語が母国語ですが、ひらがなはそれぞれ同じように発音されていると思っていました。でも、発音の途中で文字を読み飛ばしたりするのは確かにありますね。 「"け"の後ろに"い"が来たから"え"と読みました」という文で一瞬困惑しました。"け"の音の中に"e"があるからって事ですね…！？意識したことが無かったです。 それと、「きそく」の中の「き」を「k」(“i"なし）で発音するというのも気づいていませんでした。「規則」は"kisoku"と発音していると思っていましたが、私が間違っていたのかも知れません😂 むずかしいにも関わらず、沢山の人が日本語勉強してくれていて嬉しいです！うまくいきますように！

@wiandryadiwasistio2062

Жыл бұрын

learning japanese with LaTiN cHarAcTeRs: not stonks learning japanese with ひらがな: stonks learning 漢字: *not stonks*

Thomas was already pronouncing を as you would as a particle "O" instead of the character "Wo" so "all pronunciation is the same" was doomed to be confusing from the start

@jort93z

Жыл бұрын

i believe in the reform of 1946 they turned all the を's inside words into お's, and now を is only use for the particle.

@Janken_Pro

Жыл бұрын

owo

I love these videos because they make me realize all the complicated rules I've been following without realizing it. Learning by ear then diving into the theory years later is weird.

「いつも同じように発音されますが、」の「が、」がきれいな鼻濁音になっててよかったです。

I was taught the same as the video, always been pronouncing /ee/ instead of /ei/ for gakusei, sensei, tokei, etc, only to find out both prononunciations are used by japanese people.

@xXJ4FARGAMERXx

Жыл бұрын

Especially when singing.

and this is why Thomas decided to become a train

理論で攻めるとおかしくなるのね 面白い着眼点😂 普通に生きてたら絶対気づけないから面白いなこのチャンネル

Thomas is jouzu

I just realized something about a song I listen to called "@ The Same Time" by NobodyKnows+. In the song, the singer pronounced the word 煙 (kemuri / smoke) as KEmuri instead of keMURI. For a while, I've also been pronouncing it that way, but one day I looked it up and realized I had been pronouncing it wrong. Now, it just so happens that this group is from Kansai and sing with a Kansai accent, and I read somewhere that in a Kansai accent, some accents are flipped, explaining the difference.

@jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Жыл бұрын

In song lyrics all bets are off anyway.

@Bobbias

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, one thing that people often don't realize when learning pitch accent is that regional dialects can have wildly different pitch accent compared to the standard Tokyo dialect.

Dougen→Doogen

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

どぅげん

先生の「あ、わかった」がおもろい

I've misread the title as "Thanos learns basic japanese" and had a mental whiplash.

@rainbowmagic3585

Жыл бұрын

Same but I quickly _snapped_ back

"Please remember this one exception." I laughed out loud.

The awkward stare at 2:04 is the best 😂🤣🤣

Oh god, the 場合 pronunciation. I literally asked one sensei why some people said 「ばわい」 or 「ばやい」and got told that they'd never heard anyone say it like that. I asked because they had just said 「ばわい」...

おもしろいです😂 わたしも英語圏の方に考えたこともないような質問をされて、慌てることがよくあります😂

As a non-native English speaker, I'm kinda amazed on how I can differentiate between certain vowel sounds across many English accents easily just by observing the way people talked. The same thing on Japanese where I first just watching Japanese speak to each other, most of the time daily and casual conversations. I picked up those different pronunciations more easily than from a textbook because it contradicts so much.

@dinushadushmantha1032

Жыл бұрын

That’s the best way to do that. Let it happen naturally. If you try to remember everything as rules you never gonna finish learning it and eventually fuk up everything thing and 訳がわからんくなります。

@lazy_biscuits08

Жыл бұрын

I picked up my pronunciations from anime, although it can get a bit messy when there's a different regional accent involved.

「いう」は「ゆう」になるもんねー。

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

それは「いく」が「ゆく」になるってもんでしょ？！

@laxminarayanbhandari855

2 ай бұрын

​​@@OmarLivesUnderSpace あっ！それは違う。「い」が「う」のまえあったら「ゆう」に発音されます。これだけは覚えておけね。😊

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

2 ай бұрын

@@laxminarayanbhandari855 覚えてイくよ👌🏻

@laxminarayanbhandari855

2 ай бұрын

@@OmarLivesUnderSpace イく？😳😳

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

2 ай бұрын

@@laxminarayanbhandari855 イくイく👌🏻

Wait till he finds out all the reading that goes into a Kanji 先生:「日本の文字はいつも同じ風に読まれる、だって、生の字はせい、しょう、なま、い、お、う、は…」 Thomas:「😮」

@Bobbias

Жыл бұрын

To be fair, most kanji don't have as many readings as 生.

@dvx-ze1qz

Жыл бұрын

@@Bobbias that’s true, but the vast majority of them have two or more readings, and a single word can have multiple kanji choices (測る　図る　計る　量るare all はかる)

@joe_z

Жыл бұрын

I remember one person pointing out that with all the various readings of 生, the phrase 生生生生生生 can be read as おいしいなまぎゅうにゅう (delicious raw milk).

@wiandryadiwasistio2062

Жыл бұрын

生: 👁️👄👁️

"ばわい” got the lol out of me.

Oh my GOSH this one is FUNNY!! I’ve seen this play out soooo many times in my various Japanese classes!! Well done!

Thomas is ahead of me. My brain just went “that’s “ke” not “e” so I’ll ignore all that other stuff” 😂.

language rly said i have rules but they’re all meant to be broken all the time and you just have to memorise exactly where they get broken and where they apply 🥰

thank you dogen for validating my struggling 日本語 journey once agin!!

My japanese teacher would write this at the top of the board at the start of every lesson and just point to it any time we came across something like this. Then we would move on. TJTWII - That's just the way it is. Always remember that Mr. Miller.

Thank you so much for learning basic Japanese!

Us learning about Keigo (Respectful language) Teacher: "Basically, if you put 'O' or 'GO' before most words, they become respectful. I know some of you already know some of these words. Mr. A, can you give us an example? Mr. A: *GO* han Teacher: Ii desu ne! Mr. B? Mr. B: *O* kane Teacher: Subarashii! How about you? **points at me** Me: *O* mae

This is why I'll never bother learning rules in any language. They never make sense, there's too many to keep in mind, and it's easier to just learn them from practice.

This is how I feel about every language I've made even a passive interest in trying to learn the pronunciation of (just interesting to me from a phonetics perspective, often not a language I have any interest in actually learning). Teachers and native speakers all say American pronunciation from spelling is essentially random and their own language's pronunciation is consistent, but it never is. Russian is a language I actually learned to a decent level (somewhere just shy of B2) and the more I learned, the more I realized that there are an insane number of exceptions to the supposedly pure orthography. Not only are there an insane amount of general rules, as well as "rules" for specific consonant clusters that only apply in a handful of words, like солнце /solnce/ where the /l/ is silent and чувствовать /chuvstvovat'/ (ok, вств is an incredibly common cluster, but still) where the first /v/ is silent, but there is also the issue of palatalization. Looking at a cluster of 5 consonants followed by a soft vowel, and trying to decide which of those 5 consonants should be hard and which should be soft is a nightmare. Wade et al's A Comprehensive Russian Grammar is an invaluable resource for trying to figure this out, but there are so many rules, along with exceptions to those rules, the rules almost only exist for linguistic interest rather than to help a person learning the language. At a certain point, I gave up on learning the insane number of "rules" for which consonants in a cluster should be palatalized and which not, and just listened carefully to how native speakers pronounced the words I wanted to use. This, after all, is how native speakers learn the language, but as a foreigner with limited exposure to the language, learning by assimilation is generally not very practical. Anyway, I think anyone who says their language's orthography is perfect and transparent to the pronunciation is deluding themselves. And many people who learn a foreign language as an adult and claim the language's orthography is perfect are overestimating their own understanding of the language's phonetics. Many of them speak with strong accents that they don't recognize, and thus assume that their simple and consistent, but incorrect pronunciation is a reflection of the language itself. Spanish is an example people bring up as having a perfectly transparent pronunciation, but that's not true -- for example, the suffix -ado is often spoken as -ao, eg pescado -> pescao (I'm not entirely sure if I need an accent over the /a/ here in the second version, it's been a long time since my high school spanish class and rules on stress...). Anyway, orthography will never match 1-1 with spoken language the way one might hope, because written language is prescribed and mostly fixed, and spoken language is subject to the whims of the speakers and fluid.

@azarishiba2559

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The -ao pronunciation is actually colloquial and depending on region. If you pronounce "pescado" as "pescao" here in Costa Rica, people would think you are either joking or a an "andaluz". It's true the "d" sounds softer between vowels (I forgot the name of that especific consonant, I think it's called an "aproximante", but that is a more unconscious and even automatical pronunciation. Phonetically speaking, yes, no letter in many languages represents just one phonetic sound, but phonologically speaking, Spanish is pretty consistent with its pronunciation rules. Even if it differs from region to region, there is consistency, like the -ao rule in some regions.

@voskresenie-

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@@azarishiba2559 oh yeh, I realize -ao is dialectal and I'm not disputing that Spanish orthography is pretty dang consistent, just using it as an example that no orthography can simultaneously 1) be consistent across dialects, 2) be entirely a sum of its individual components, and 3) have only one way to spell a given series of sounds. If the "pescao" pronunciation were written as it's pronounced, it wouldn't be consistent across dialects. But if it's written as "pescado", then the pronunciation isn't a sum of individual components and there is then more than one way of spelling the same -ao sound. 'ci', 'ce', and 'z' are probably better examples of this -- in most dialects, they are entirely redundant with 's', but in (parts of?) Spain and maybe elsewhere, they are a distinct sound. But even where they're pronounced as 'th', there's no reason 'ci' and 'ce' can't be spelled with a 'z' with 'c' only appearing in front of 'a', 'o', and 'u'.

@azarishiba2559

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@@voskresenie- Oh, I see. In standard Spanish there is a distinction between "z" and "s", but in South Spain there isn't. Since people who came to America (continent) were precisely from this part of Spain, this feature stayed in American Spanish from Mexico to Argentina. I don't know were exactly came the rule not only in Spanish, but other Romance languages as well have something similar, that we can't write "ze" and "zi", but "ce" and "ci" (the only exception I know is the word "enzima" [A protein, I think], in order to differentiate from the word "encima" ["above"]; and also the word "zénit", although it's not recomendable). Although these rules are... arbitrary, to say the least, they are still consistent. No Spanish speaker will write "cero" as "zero" or "cielo" as "zielo". Same goes with g vrs gu vrs gü, and c vrs qu in front of e and i. Even more, these last ones doesn't have exceptions. Again, "pescao" it's highly informal. That's why it's not usual to write it like that. One thing is highly colloquial and casual pronunciation, and other is formal pronunciation. Even then, the rules are consistent in many languages, at least in its formal or standard forms. And usually many exceptions are quite easily to grasp. While I agree that there is barely a 100% full transparent orthography and that, yes, it's not quite true to say "my language is written as it's pronounced", many English learners still have a point about standard English and its correlation between its writing and pronunciation. Even French, in which many letters are mute, still have pretty consistent rules about how to pronounce them. But in English it's barely the case. There is also a reason why a spelling contest is a real challenge in English and not quite it in Spanish.

@voskresenie-

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@@azarishiba2559 Ahh, I'd forgotten about z turning to c before i and e -- been a while (like a decade) since I've studied it, but that's ringing a bell with, eg, subjunctives of -zar verbs. I'm not meaning to say Spanish doesn't have great orthography -- I think it does. I'm more just trying to illustrate that there can't be a perfect orthographic system while allowing for multiple dialects to use the same spelling. g vs gu vs gü is all consistent and predictable from pronunciation, assuming you know it's a g -- but for example, gente could just as easily be spelled jente, and jefe could just as easily be spelled gefe -- unless there's some dialectal distinction between j and soft g that I'm not aware of. And c vs qu is also easy, if it's a /k/ sound, but if you had never heard the word cielo before and you spoke a dialect where soft c is /s/, you'd have no way of knowing it wasn't sielo, or that siete isn't ciete. Same with empezar -- in a dialect without the /th/ sound, if you'd never heard the word before, you'd have no way of knowing it wasn't empesar, and no way of knowing pasar isn't pazar. Dialects that don't distinguish z and soft c from s have to deal with this imperfection (minor as it is) in order to accommodate the dialects that do distinguish, if they want to have consistent spelling. Same can be said of the "ll" and "y". I think most dialects (correct me if I'm wrong) have yeísmo, and in those dialects, if you'd never heard the word mayor, you'd have no way of knowing it wasn't mallor, or that it's allá not ayá. (I acknowledge this isn't a great example because y is mostly only used in loanwords, in conjugated and derived forms of verbs like creyo or creyente, and in short common words like y, yo, and ya, which anyone familiar with the language would know how to spell. But y does appear as a derivative of Latin consonantal i (like maior -> mayor) and of Latin g in certain natural Spanish words, like legenda -> leyenda and ego -> yo, as well as cases of the same sound shift but no 'y', eg frigeo/frigus/frigidus -> frío, the y being unnecessary following the i, so the Latin g just disappears.) And I'm not aware of any dialect where h is pronounced at all and couldn't just be replaced by adding an accent on vowels where removing the h would change stress. But if it is distinguished in any dialects, the same point applies to it as the other letters here. Again, my point isn't to pick on Spanish, actually the opposite -- it's got the most consistent orthography of any language I've been exposed to, and yet it's still not perfect, because perfect is impossible unless every person using the orthography makes identical phonetic distinctions -- no more and no less than any other speaker. If one speaker distinguishes two sounds that another speaker doesn't, then either the first speaker needs to accept that one letter can have two different sounds, or the second speaker needs to accept that one sound can be spelled with two different letters. Thanks for all the info though, this has been interesting.

“I walked into that one”….yes…..yes he did.😂

Demo, sense-i wa... I died laughing

A 3 minute lesson is worth more than 10 years of listening and speaking.

i like this exchange a lot, it's cute. makes me wanna learn things from people and/or be a humble teacher

Yeah, learning a new language is often: "this rule always applies, except when it doesn't." lol

Many things are taught backwards. A general rule is formed in hindsight, but starting at the general rule usually just causes more confusion.

The truth is, this "In Japan we have it different" thing applies not only to language.

I am glad I found this channel, it has been really helpful to me lately! ...and this is why you should not take rules by heart and even toss them away when you learn languages. Just imitate how others speak, learn their accent even...and when you find this kind of exceptions, just think about how it was made so to sound better or make it easier on the tongue, that is usually the case in most instances, like romance languages...and french, specially french. It might seem hard at first to remember all the exceptions, but it will become second nature with practice, I promise.

The pain of every japanese learner crammed into one short video. >_

every language has these weird exceptions that look extremely annoying to learners, and native speakers never really pay attention to until someone foreign mentions them.

I started seriously learning Japanese about 3 days ago (using Genki and renshuu), and learned about the inconsistently sounding い yesterday. And now I'm getting this recommended to me, which adds more inconsistencies to it...

@johannah4770

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Nah, it's actually pretty consistently there when it's not after an eh sound, between two unvoiced consonants, or in the end of the word after shi or chi.

Watch him also ask about the nasal velar in ですが at the end 😂 great video as always

Now that I've been studying more, this- hits different.

I've always thought of complex verbs like 受け入れました as two words in one, thus didn't ever have questioned pronunciation. That's second best to 日本語はフラットです。

I think there is only one situation where you need to pronounce い as え：when you pronounce a kanji using the on-yomi, which means: 1:え and い must be in the same kanji. 2:the kanji is in a "Chinese word"(kango, or on-yomi word)， not in a indigenous japanese word（wago, or kun-yomi word）. （姪（めい）is indigenous japanese word. 学生 is a "Chinese word".） The reason for that I think is the second kana in kanji(on-yomi) are generally not important. Maybe because in China, where kanji is born , all kanji are monosyllabic（this also expain why these rules only apply to "Chinese words"）. Also, I found Japanese people sometimes like to pronounce the い in those on-yomi words as "yi" when speaking slowly, or singing a song. By the way， I think it is ばあい（場合）, not ばわい.

@user-mg9ph5kl3z

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We, Japanese people, cannot hear the difference between "i" and "yi". So we completely think we always pronounce "i" even we pronounce "yi".

@solarrain1176

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@@user-mg9ph5kl3z By that I mean pronounce the い as い but not as え.

もう発音方法なんてなんでもいいじゃん笑

Dang! Dogen is awesome!🤩

i would say the best way to teach how Japanese writing works is to first introduce the concepts of morae and syllables, then show that morae and syllables are not the same thing, and then teach that kana always represent morae and kanji almost always represent syllables [insert ten thousand footnotes here].

@bobboberson8297

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"kanji almost always represent syllables" 事実. what a great 規則 that shows how 特別 japanese writing is. Gonna go tell all my 友達 about this when I see them on 月曜日

@spiderwebb222

Жыл бұрын

@@bobboberson8297 I can only imagine OP meant, kanji represent a differing number of syllables depending on the reading. But even then, syllables is not exactly a concept you can map onto Japanese. That's why learning about mora is so essential.

@bobboberson8297

Жыл бұрын

@@spiderwebb222 That interpretation doesn't make sense in the context of everything else they said; that's an entirely new idea. I think what they actually were trying to express was "kanji can demarcate syllables but kana generally can't." This would make much more sense and also calls back to the video talking about 受け入れる which has the い in 入れる pronounced as it's own syllable (which makes sense because there is a kanji there to split up the sounds/words) but うけいれる would be unclear in pronunciation since it's just kana. They were pretty on the mark when they said 10 thousand footnotes are needed to make sense of their comment

まぁ、発音で意味が変わる事は無いけどね、あくまで綺麗な発音なだけ

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

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・・・どういうこと？

@user-yc3jk4vg8n

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@@OmarLivesUnderSpace 日本語は発音で意味が変わる事は無い。 綺麗な発音をしたい場合だけ少し難しくなる。

I now feel less bad about telling my ESL learners that "English is weird and nobody will ever fully understand it."

Thanks for the video :)

笑えるｗｗｗ　すごいなあ、どうげんさん。

I thought Thomas was going to pronounce 永遠 as "えーえん" at some point

@lolipedofin

Жыл бұрын

🤣🤣🤣

なお方言によってはきそくのキのイはハッキリ発音してる場合があります

This resonates on so many levels 👌😂

if only that'd be the hardest part in learning japanese hehe

Lol, as someone who went through this same disillusionment, I definitely feel student-kun's pain!

I think that these exceptions are easier to pick up just by listening to the language being spoken, as opposed to trying to memorise all the rules.

In casual conversation, we Japanese pronounce some words differently than they should be pronounced. For example, 体育(たいいく) -> たいく 放送(ほうそう) -> ほうそー 三角形(さんかくけい) -> さんかっけー 洗濯機(せんたくき) -> せんたっき I don't know why.

BEANIE DOGEN RETURNETH

I realized recently that I am pretty lucky. Since I have been listening to Japanese for over a decade and absorbing bits an pieces, the language feels very easy to learn formally. This lead me to think that maybe I could learn other languages relatively easily. I started trying to learn a bit of Mandarin and a bit of Korean, and I could not pronounce anything without having it read to me first, and even then, I struggled, especially with Korean. Even though I don't have a ton of formal education in Japanese, I recognize words, and I know how they sound. This makes learning the language significantly easier as for the most part I feel like I am filling in the gaps instead of learning from scratch. To give an idea of where I have ended up after years of passively learning. I can watch a trailer for a show, or listen to a conversation in Japanese, and have a relatively decent idea of what they are saying. I can also recognize polite vs. impolite speech, I can recognize the major dialects (although they can make it hard to understand what is being said), and I can recognize trash translations or Americanized translations which occasionally torpedo the humor of a scene. Long message, I know, but this was just something I found quite interesting.

I wish all teachers were as understanding as sensei. I remember asking my Arabic teacher about how fatha should be pronounced in a specific word, and she said "it's always the same! Ah! Ah! Ah! Fehtheh!" (For clarification, fatha is a vowel mark that's pronounced like ah, a, or eh, depending on the sounds around it. Apparently in the word fatha both are pronounced like "eh.")

Love it. Amazing.

I'm just starting to study Japanese. What am I getting myself into...

@sweetdurt2143

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Don't worry, you get used to it. English pronouncation us much more complicated than Japanese, and there is a few rules you have to learn them as you go, they are very simple.

@humanbean3

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it seems overwhelming at first, but most of it just comes naturally as you learn more and more words and start reading/listening to more and more sentences. you don't even have to know any of these rules honestly.

@GugureSux

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の苦しみがあります

@JpImmersion

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When you're a beginner sometimes these kinds of videos can make it seem much tougher/overwhelming than it actually is to learn Japanese, so don't sweat it. You'll pick up good pronunciation after listening to a lot of Japanese

@jdzspace33

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Pain

I never get tired of watching your videos ❤️ I'm learning atarashii thinfs

lol!! These videos are gold

I laughed at “kihon teki ni istumo “. That’s totally something I would say.

I never had a problem with the うけいれました because I always thought it was a compound word. Isn't it the same idea as English compound words where they keep their original sounds generally speaking?

@henryrichard7619

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They do except when they don’t. I have no idea what happened to forecastle (foke-sol).

Still though, much much much MUCH easier than English pronouncation rules.

@ilia321

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Wait, English pronunciation has rules? I thought it only had exceptions.

@dragskcinnay3184

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@@ilia321 it does! Just... not for everything, and it has 19741285165355265+6 exceptions. Per rule.

@sweetdurt2143

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@@dragskcinnay3184 couldn't say it better myself

"Just learn each word" is basically the answer with every language. Then when there is actual reasonable regularity, it feels like a bonus. I mention this every time someone says that English is different to Chinese in that for Chinese you have to learn each character, by pointing out that in reality, for natives at least, when you know a word very well, you're kind of doing the same: seeing the whole word as a form that is singular and directly represents that word, and not actually reading the separate letters. Ta'hts aslo the rsoean for tihs pnoeeohmnn. Just learn how the word is said, ignore the letters. That's what we actually do anyway, when we reach any useful level of the language. Thus maybe listening all the time is such a key thing, plus that's how we're naturally evolved to understand language anyway.

thanks dogen. nihongo not too easy.

こういう常套句多いよね😂 僕もスペイン語やドイツ語を学ぼうと思った時に必ず「〜語は英語と違って基本ローマ字読みでいいんです！」って書かれてるw なお、どの言語もこの動画のようにネイティブすら説明できない音韻体系がある模様😢

Every language thinks they're less complicated than English (which is true, but not nearly as much a they think!).

@ButchLeColosse

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I'm a native French speaker and I think French is more complicated than English by a landslide.

@dragskcinnay3184

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@@ButchLeColosse I'm French too and I think French spelling is right behind English for the title of Worst Spelling Ever. They both have lots (LOTS) of exceptions and inconsistencies everywhere, words that are written the same but pronounced differently, etc. But, English has the "ea" digraph. Which has has two main pronunciations. And it's not that there's lot of exceptions, there literally _is no rule._ You just have to guess. Not even French has that.

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

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I'm Ukrainian and I don't give a fuск what you think my language thinks

That’s the beauty of languages, there are rules and exceptions :)

い only become a long え if the word is Onn Yomi (usually a 2 characters word with Kanji only), ie. 先生(SenSe-) 経験(Ke-Ken). This is because Onn Yomi was from Chinese pronunciation, and each Chinese character only has one syllable in Chinese. Words with Kun Yomi are always pronun as い. 招いて is a good example, since it uses Kun Yomi, it's pronounced "Maneite" not "Mane-te". Although 姪 is Kanji, we usually only use the Kun Yomi, so it's pronounced "Mei" not "Me-". The example in the video "受け入れ" is a compound verb. You can see it as 受け＋入れ, which are both Kun Yomi, so you say it as "Uke Ire", not "Uke Ere".

こんなこと意識したことなかったな

@OmarLivesUnderSpace

Жыл бұрын

さすが短慮軽率やんけ

トーマス、日本語初心者のはずなのに初っぱなの「…はい」からネイティブすぎて草

This is so funny haha. One thing though, the "silent" い is not actually silent, its just unvoiced. English doesn't have voiceless vowels so learners may have trouble understanding what that means but basically try whispering just the き in きそく or the く in がくせい

As someone who can speak german this "technically its always the same but sometimes it's not and occasionally its something entirely different" hits close to home. With some works i just gave up on the why it is that way. So much for the hope a 5th language will be easier to learn.