As we all know, one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is immerse yourself in an environment where it is beneficial, even necessary to communicate in that language. One of the pitfalls of this type of situation is that there is always the chance of miscommunication, either because you make a mistake… Read More »
Japanese, unlike English, has the convenience of a pretty direct mapping between writing and sounds, at least where Hiragana and Katakana are concerned. In other words, if you see a word in writing it’s pretty easy to guess how it should sound and vice versa. However, there are some cases where things are pronounced a… Read More »
Although this is a textual blog, I can’t help but talk about Japanese pronunciation now and then because it’s such an important element to being fluent. This morning I was listening to a Japanese podcast and had an interesting mini-discovery about the japanese letter ‘ん’ (‘n’), so I thought I would share it with everyone.… Read More »
Normally I try to stay away from writing about pronunciation too much on a text blog – after all using words you can only say so much about how things sound. Some things are best learned in person, or at least with an audio blog or podcast (which I may try to do someday). But… Read More »