On the audio of the vocabulary lessons I noticed that sometimes even though it is written ( O U )… - Feed Post by sutefuan
On the audio of the vocabulary lessons I noticed that sometimes even though it is written ( O U ) they pronounce it ( U O )... Could this just be the accent of the speaker or should I consider this pronunciation as the golden rule ?
posted by sutefuan
Comments 8
It could be an error. If noticed some audio of certain vocabulary lessons did not match with what it was written. It was so confusing that I had to look up translated and all.
I also noticed those errors, I guess it could be synonyms. There is also (TO, DO, NO) that sometimes sound like (TA, DA, NA) especially at the end of a word. Kind of confusing, unless there is some grammatical rules that I ignore...
Which specific words have you noticed this on?
I'm taking an educated guess and going with 料理 (りょうり) being one of them? In the case of this word, the first 'syllable' (mora) is "りょ" (RYO) and the second is う (U). The small kana ょ in "りょ" means that it is not pronounced り (RI) + よ (YO), but rather it is pronounced as a single sound りょ = RI+yo = RYO. So, with the Y semivowel sound mixed with the O vowel sound, the O sound in this word may sound a little different compared to the O sound in other syllables that don't have semivowel sounds blended with the vowel sound. (man, this is awkward to word in a coherent manner.)
Or do you mean you noticed this in situations different to the one I mentioned? Hope this helps, if what I wrote made sense. ^^- It has been a very long time since I have came across such errors, like 2 years ago long. Just before they updated the changes for this site. I will have to go look back at one of my study books to find which ones they were. It included the sounds for each sentences at the time, before it was changed.
- I should also have mentioned that O U is meant to be pronounced as a long O vowel sound, rather than them sounding like two separate different sounds one after the other.
おはよう (O HA YO U) — a Japanese phrase used for saying "Good morning!". Using the よう "YOU" part of this word as an example, the OU vowel sound is a long O vowel sound. One way of writing おはよう in romaji is "ohayou", but ways in other romanisation styles include "ohayo", "ohayoo" and "ohayō". The line above the ō in that last style marks it is a long vowel: よう in kana = yō in romaji.
Incidentally, the word ローマ字 "romaji" (roman letters) has a long O vowel sound too. This word can be written in romaji as "romaji", "roomaji", "roumaji", or "rōmaji". It is always a long O vowel sound, even though you'll nearly always see it written as simply "romaji" pretty much everywhere if it is written within English text. A bit like 東京 (とうきょう) "TO U KYO U" — Tokyo (rather than Toukyou/Tookyoo/Tōkyō).
Sorry if this stuff was way too basic and unnecessary to explain. Hopefully it's of help to some people who might read it eitherway. ^^; - Actually it's not that bad of an explanation. It would help those who are beginners at this. I learned it the natural way of spelling it which is exactly how your described it. The writing when reading it wasn't a problem for me, but the fact that the audio was not matching or way out of sync with the phrases or sentence structure.
Thankfully I have just found my notebook, from 2014. So I just have to find what words I was talking about. - thanks for the comments. I guess the spoken words against the written ones may vary from time to time. A native speaker must be influenced by the trends that develops over the years. The narrator is female most of the time, maybe it influence. I read somewhere that men and women in Japan speak differently.
- It's possible. I found one of the problems I had that year. It was with 走る（はしる）＝ To run
Here is one of the example sentences that was given:（人）に追いつこうとして走る. The audio voice over did exactly how it was phrased, but something the kanji 走、might end up being pronounce differently in the sentence. It would always cause me a problem. So always do a 'background check' I like to call it by translating it.
