Without the っ, this would take three beats to say (bi-ku-ri, 1-2-3). Let’s take the word “bikkuri” (びっくり: surprise) as an example. For those of you who are musically inclined, each hiragana character is a beat, and a っ is a rest. It will almost always come before a consonant, and I was taught that it extends the consonant sound that comes after it, but it does so with a stop in sound. The basic idea is that っ marks a stop in speech. You’re going to see this a lot, both in the hiragana っ and the katakana ッ. In my opinion, っ is a bit more difficult to get used to, and it’s a bit of a challenge to explain in writing. “Ryu” and “riyu” are different, and mispronunciations like that will be confusing for whoever you are speaking to. The biggest thing is the make sure they only take up one syllable. With some of them, you’ll lose the “y” sound completely, while others (like “bya” and “ryo”) will keep it. If you would like to practice, say them separately (like “shi-ya”), then make them into one syllable (“sha”). These sounds are all used in really basic words like “shashin” (写真, しゃしん: photograph), “shuu” (週, しゅう: week), and “shokuji” (食事, しょくじ: meal). So we can say “sha,” “shu,” and “sho” as well. If you look at a hiragana chart, the only character in the “s” column that is pronounced with a “sh” is “shi.” Adding these small characters to modify the vowel sound lets us use “sh” with other vowels. To see a clear example of changing the vowel sound, we can look at the “shi” row. This chart alone adds 33 new sounds that we can make in Japanese, just by changing vowel sounds. You’ll probably also notice that there are a lot of these. It’s natural when speaking for an “i” sound to connect smoothly to a “y” sound. The first thing you may notice with this chart is that the only hiragana sounds regularly modified by these small hiragana are the ones that end in an “i” sound, except for い and ぢ (it appears both of these are excluded because they would be too much of a pain to say). To help illustrate how this works, let’s look at this handy chart. The main purpose of these is the change the vowel sound. Japanese only has 46 hiragana, so without these modified sounds, you would only be able to make 46 different sounds. These can be combined with other hiragana characters to make different sounds. With this first group, you can see that these are all the hiragana in Japanese that start with a “y” sound.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |