はじめまして Hajimemashite Instead of pronounced ma-shee te, why is it pronounced mash-te? Is there a… - Feed Post by Whinzer9
はじめまして Hajimemashite Instead of pronounced ma-shee te, why is it pronounced mash-te? Is there a way to tell how it is pronounced by how it is spelled? Or is google translate lying to me on how it is pronounced and it is "shee"? I thought し meant "shee"?! Same with ぬ shouldn't it be nu not me? =.= Is this just a weird "exception to the rule" thing? ..... Is this common?
posted by Whinzer9
Comments 14
Wait a second maybe Hiragana doesn't cover all sounds? Ah derp I really don't know. I think I officially looked at this at every possible angle I could think of.
め is me. ぬ is nu. There's a difference between the two. Just as the end of a word ending in u has the u quieter/silent (highly dependent on where you are in Japan), sometimes, but not often, vowels in the middle of a word can have a lesser sound than what you'd expect. 初めまして is one of those. Japanese does not have nearly as many pronunciation problems as English, but they do exist. A very small number of them.
Try saying はじめまして quickly, with each hiragana being pronounced for equal durations. Once you try this you shouldn't even need to ask why that し gets pronounced differently to how it should normally.
The reason why し (and other kana ending in い or う sounds) aren't always pronounced the normal way is simply to do with what position they are within the word and what the sounds of the symbols immediately before/after it are.
I think this has to do with where your tongue is in your mouth when you pronounce properly the kana sounds ending in い or う. With い the tip of your tongue is near the top-front of your mouth; with う the tip of your tongue is near the top-back of your mouth. Because the tongue moves upwards to pronounce these sounds, the air travelling over your tongue gets interrupted.
I don't think there's anything wrong with pronouncing the し fully in はじめまして, only that it's not natural, so you'll just sound weird if you put a lot of stress into pronouncing it that way. ^^- It's definitely word by word case. If you say sashimi without the extended shi, people will give you looks.
- @Arachkid Good point. I forgot about pitch accent affecting it too. Now that makes things more complicated to explain... :P
- Oh dang I messed up the me! Ah thank you so much for your great comments, this is fun. :D
well even in english there are lots of words that are not at all pronounced like the alphabet would have it sound. it's a bit of a weird thing but there will always be more "sounds" in pronounciation than there is in the writing systems i think.- The differences in pronunciation in Japanese are very few and far between compared to English. English would be horrible to learn as a second language. Japanese sucks for the written character requirement (2,200 characters to be able to read a newspaper/survive in daily life with no problems?), but English is horrible for not knowing how to pronounce a word based on seeing it. Japanese has very few issues there.
- well not really...there's the "silent u" and all the other silent letters as present in the OP according to pronounciation. granted it is not as bad as other languages such as english but it's still very much present.
- That idea actually occurred to me after, like how in english we pronounce vowels like "a" either long or short, but that is something you just "know" for every word. There are rules like "i before e except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor and weigh" but in reality it is taboo and it doesn't include everything. My mom was a grammar teacher and I was homeschooled for a while sooo heh I'm part nazi. Anyways, thanks for confirming that idea in my mind! It makes it much more simple to understand.
- The "silent u" and the "silent i" aren't silent. They're less pronounced - and even that depends where you are in Japan. Seriously, the further you are in the inaka, the more likely you are to here that "silent u" go on, and on, and on.
The silent k in English is silent. There's a distinct difference between the two. - @Arachkid I also see your point. I mean, the way the written language is set up it is much more distinct. There are times when the letter is silenced but there are not letters that represent two completely different sounds!
That reminds me... that letter r. Whenever I click on a "r" hiragana pronunciation it never says the r. I thought japanese can't pronounce r in the first place so.... what is that sound? When I clicked the "a" it sounded identical to the "ra" and so forth. Is it really a sound? I could have sworn I heard something on one of em'.
Myyysteryyyyy souuund lol. - Japanese "ra" - or any of the "rarirurero", really - is kind of a mix between the English "la" and "ra". This is something that is very hard to describe in text - you should really Youtube that, I'm sure there'll be something. It was only in practicing that some 6? years back or so in class that I realized where the Patriots (of MGS) got their saying from. :P
- I definitely don't agree either with saying it's a "silent i" or "silent u".
Sometimes people really do pronounce です clearly as "desu" instead of pronouncing it naturally closer to "des-". Like Arachkid said, the "u" isn't completely silent, just muffled (due to what I mentioned in my first comment).
Now in English, try pronouncing "knight" with no silent letters! Pretty much the only letters in this that are pronounced their 'default' way are "n" and "t" :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPJIwff3w0I
Check out this 2 minute youtube video to understand what I meant in my first comment, about the tongue position for vowels. The mouth diagrams it shows are extremely useful for understanding this. ^^
