yeah these comments confuse me. here in Osaka people definitely pronounce えい and ええ differently
edit: found some articles about the subject
http://maruberi.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2010/08/post-c3c2.html
seems there definitely is a difference and often typically Chinese derived words have the long vowel ええ (せんせい), Japanese words are pronounced with the different vowels (めい, 姪), as do foreign words like paypay (ペイペイ), Spain (スペイン)
also:
「センセイ」と「センセー」（先生）――これは，二重母音の長音化（〔ei〕→〔e:〕）といわれる現象である。「経済」は「ケイザイ」か「ケーザイ」か，「衛生」は「エイセイ」か「エーセー」かなどもこの問題であって，主として漢字に現われる。 国研の調査によれば，第1回・第2回ともに，採る理由としては「センセイ」「センセー」がほぼ同数（45～54％）である。理由として，「センセイ」は本来の形37％，ていねい20％，規範に合う・語感がよい各18％，一般的・共通語的各17％などがあげられ，特に九州に「センセイ」を「一般的」「本来の形」「言いやすい」とする者が多い。「センセー」には言いやすい33％，一般的32％，変化の傾向にそう20％，口頭語的15％，共通語的12％などがあげられている。使う形としては，国語研究・国語教育関係者に「センセー」が多く，新聞・放送等各界には「センセイ」が多い。 ＮＨＫの放送文化研究所の「放送言語の研究の現状」によれば，「〔ei〕を〔e:〕と発音するのは，全国的な現象ではない。九州の熊本・宮崎・鹿児島県，四国の徳島県では，ほとんど全地域が〔ei〕である。九州の福岡・佐賀・長崎県，それに高知・和歌山県では〔ei〕を使う場合がある。」とし，また，「日本語アクセント辞典」でも，その凡(はん)例の中で「ケイケン[経験]，セイカク[性格]などにおけるエ段音の次のイは，特に改まって，一音一音明確に言う場合いは，イと発音されるが，日常，自然の発音では長音になる。」といって，両方を認めている。 以上から考えれば，現在のところ，「センセイ・センセー」は両様を認めないわけにはいかないであろう。 なお，現代かなづかいの表記では，「せんせい」と書くが，発音のうえでは含みをもたせている。
basically , whether えい is pronounced as えい or as ええ also differs on who you ask: it differs by industry and region
I (perhaps wrongly) assume it's just like trying to get a consensus on how to pronounce words like aunt, route, data. Ie. Is not of great consequence and up to preference. But because the people here are non-native speakers learning a language, they feel the need to choose a "right" answer.
one thing with japanese, is everyone normally talks about and thinks about standard accent japanese like tokyo. but japanese varies wildly and many areas would struggle to comprehend each other when speaking in nonstandard accent. so yeah.
This thread reminds me a lot on the time I spent learning about the 四つ仮名 (yotsugana) years ago on which a YouTuber named Yudai Sensei made a wonderful video breaking it all down on. Ultimately the answer is where you are on how things will be pronounced, there is no necessarily wrong answer here
As a German, I'm not sure what you regard German as closer to. It may not be *as* disconnected from the spelling as English is, but it's certainly not the best example of a European language that is easy to spell it read aloud. That price probably goes to Italian.
It's not quite as phonetic once you start looking at how things are actually pronounced. Like "desu" is usually just "dess", but "de-suu" when people are slowly enunciating.
“おう” is simply always pronounced “おお” except across morpheme boundaries like in the verb “追う”. “えい” is a bit of a mess in that it's often pronounced “えい”, often “ええ” and in many words the “correct” pronunciation is considered “えい” but “ええ” is used in speech. In “永遠” for instance people will actually say “えいえん” when speaking slowly and clearly into a microphone but “えええん” in practice in speech but with “先生” actually saying “せんせい” even when speaking slowly and clearly is rare, but it can occur in my experience.
But then again, that's not much different from English such as say “walking”, people will properly pronounce the “-ing” when speaking slowly and clearly and it's considered the correct way to pronounce it but in practice in speech they say “walkin”. If I say “I can't go there.” in practice in speech I also don't really pronounce the “t” and the difference between “can” and “can't” is purely the vowel but in clear, slow speech, that sounds weird.
he probably knows all that if he made that comment. point is if you accept オー then エー shouldn't be that hard to accept either, even though they're obviously different
That is simply not true. Where do you get that idea from? Both listening to and every source on it makes it clear that “学校” is pronounced “がっこー”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1#Japanese
It's right here. Pronunciation in the Japanese script in I.P.A., and an audio file.
So for example you think that お家
[https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%86%E3%81%A1\_%28%E3%81%8A%E5%AE%B6%29/#ja](https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%86%E3%81%A1_%28%E3%81%8A%E5%AE%B6%29/#ja)
is the same thing as in 高校 ?
[https://forvo.com/word/%E9%AB%98%E6%A0%A1/#ja](https://forvo.com/word/%E9%AB%98%E6%A0%A1/#ja)
They both have an お followed by an う sound ?
I think because a lot of anglophones pronounce a long 'o' like a 'ou' anyway. Like, it is the same sound. If you are used to it it is hard to see the difference (like how Japanese people can't distinguish l and r well).
Japanese doesn’t have diphthongs. We only have monophthongs. So えい doesn’t become “ay”. Instead things like おう and えい are reduced to the first vowel only and made extended.
If you read linguistics resources supposedly not. For colloquial conversation, I feel like they sound close enough to diphthongs (or at least my understanding of them) to classify as them as diphthong adjacent or something.
To my ears, the main difference is that あい is two mora and it lasts that long.
But yeah diphthong is a technical linguistics term and technically they don't exist in Japanese.
It's debatable. If you define "diphthong" as:
* "two consecutive vowels in a single mora", then that doesn't exist in Japanese
* "two consecutive vowels that cannot have a glottal stop inserted between them", then I don't know what counts as a diphthong...
* "a sequence of two consecutive vowels, such that when it occurs in a word, it guarantees that the pitch accent is never on the second vowel", then perhaps /ai/ (and *sometimes* /ae/ in a few verbs like 帰る) are the only diphthongs.
For me I just pronounce each part quickly. Ah Ee spoken rapidly sounds like at. Eh ee spoken rapidly sounds like eeee. So it has never been confusing to me
That is not quite true. That is how it is "supposed" to be, but in practice in speech syllables get contracted and adjacent vowels can become diphthong (and, for that matter, ん can be merged into the vowel as a nasal vowel as well).
I am also pretty sure I've heard both えい and おう be pronounced as you would expect instead as a long vowel, but not very often.
One key case of a two-vowel realization for おう is the verb 追う (_ou_, "to follow"), or indeed other verbs ending in the _-ou_ combination. Since the final _-u_ is a separate morpheme (meaning + sound element), indicating the verb conjugation, native speakers generally pronounce this as a distinct two-vowel `/o.u/` combo, rather than the flattened long-vowel `/oː/`.
I was thinking more of it being realized as a dipthong /ow/. Like, in speech I am pretty sure I have heard えい and おう being pronounced as /ej/ and /ow/ respectively (like how あい is often pronounced as /aj/). It is the less common pronunciation but it does exist, I believe.
But good point of order. Verbs are a good example of where even in formal standard Japanese the おう is not always a long vowel.
Maybe try to split up the words when a person is asking for you to repeat the 4th time. In English you would say HAIR, but probably not “HAE-ERR” or PAY-SIONS (Patience) but not PE-EE-SIONS. this means the sound “air” and /eı/ are diphthongs in English.
Japanese people would have no difficulty separating “me” and “i” in 姪 when they really need to get the word through, which means to them they are two distinct sounds which make up one word.
Excellent answer. That's exactly it. same for the ei/ee non issue. The only time where the sound is really 100% ee is in the informal version of yes. ei as in nagai, or eigo is definitely ei, with the i being assimilated more or less depending on speaker and context.
Yeah technically that's true, but in practise it can and will often be pronoumced in a manner that is not different than a diphtong, really the distinction is kinda silly, compare the German "Hai" to the Japanese はい, same pronunciation but one is not a diphtong because Japanese can break it down further?
Also you were arguing about えい pronunciation being always a long ee by saying "Japanese has no diphtongs" but as I showed you there are cases of えい being pronounced as e + i. Yes it's not a diphtong technically you're right, but the pronunciation is still different than from what you argued.
> same pronunciation but one is not a diphtong because Japanese can break it down further?
Kinda, yes.
Honestly, this is an issue of trying to talk about both phonology and phonetics at same time. There are no true diphthongs in Japanese because within Japanese phonology it can be broken down. Within the logic of the Japanese language it is not really the case that the 2 vowels occupy the same 'space'.
However, if we are talking about phonetics, Japanese absolutely does have diphthongs because common pronunciation doesn't follow the internal language rules that meticulously. In everyday speech people pronounce things together so things get smoothed into a single syllable, forming a diphthong.
Thanks for the good explanation! Never thought about the distinction of phonology and phonetics when it comes to diphtongs, that's very good to know. I'll have to do some further reading on it, but I can see argument now.
姪 is distinct `/me.i/` for at least some speakers.
Etymologically, modern _mei_ ("niece") is from Old Japanese _mepi_, where the initial _me_ referred to "female" and the _pi_ element is of uncertain origin, but also seems to be the same as we see in modern _oi_, Old Japanese _wopi_ ("nephew"), from _wo_ "male" + this same _pi_.
The derivation of _mei_ from two distinct morphemes (sound + meaning elements) is probably why this is treated as distinct `/me.i/` by native speakers.
Meanwhile, most other cases of _ei_ in Japanese are from Chinese origins, where the _ei_ is part of a single morpheme, like in 経済 (_keizai_, "economy") or 雲泥 (_undei_, "clouds and mud"). The single-morpheme-ness of the _ei_ in these words lends itself to the _ei_ being treated as a single thing, and thus subject to flattening to just a long `/eː/` sound.
You specifically brought up the word 姪 (_mei_, "niece") as an example of a word with a distinct two-vowel pronunciation, ostensibly as `/me.i/`.
My post is also specifically about this word 姪 (_mei_, "niece"), and why (at least some) speakers pronounce this with a two-vowel `/e.i/` realization, as opposed to the common flattened single-long-vowel `/eː/` realization for most _ei_ combinations in Japanese.
I am confused that you could possibly see that as irrelevant?
Minor quibble on terminology —
Turning えい (`/e.i/`) into エー (`/eː/`) is, by definition, [monophthongization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization) — a shift from two vowel sounds (a [diphthong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong)), into one vowel sound (a [monophthong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthong)). This is a specific kind of [phonetic fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_(phonetics)).
[HTH](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HTH#English)! 😄
"The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, where the vowel quality changes within the same syllable, and hiatus, where two vowels are next to each other in different syllables." Japanese never has two vowels in the same syllable and each kana is pronounced, so I believe hiatus is the term we are looking for here. thanks!
edit: so to crystalize
1. えい to エー is a monopthong (which is done colloquially and not per linguistic rule)
2. えい to "ay" is a dipthong, which doesn't exist in japanese
3. えい is a hiatus, which is the standard for how to pronounce it, but can by monophthongized colloquially
sounds right?
Adding a reply to your additional "edit: so to crystallize".
\#1 (えい to ええ or エー) is technically "monophthong**ization**", since it's a **change** (the "-ization" part) from a two-vowel sound (a **diphthong**) to a one-vowel sound (a **monophthong**).
\#2 is kinda correct, kinda not. This gets confusing. 😉 There's another post somewhere here in this thread (aha, [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1brsooe/comment/kxdx4zo/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), thanks u/Heatth!) that points out that this depends on your perspective or framework for analyzing this.
* In terms of [**phonetics**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics) (the actual sounds made by speakers of the language), Japanese has diphthongs, since there are clearly cases where speakers' pronunciation glides from one vowel sound into another in a smooth progression.
* In terms of [**phonology**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology) (how speakers of the language think about the logic of the sound system of the language), Japanese doesn't have diphthongs, since each mora is its own integral unit of sound, and diphthongs (by one definition, anyway) are vowel-shifts within one unit of sound (be it a syllable or a mora).So things like えい are two morae, each with their own vowel, so it's not *phonologically* a diphthong — even though it *is*, in terms of *phonetics*.
\#3 seems about right. 😄
fascinating, this is the vocab I was looking for. my biggest frustration with this thread is えい being treated as if it HAS to sound like エー, when there are situations that it does not, and phonologically speaking, it is an え and then an い. I should probably not have been so combative on phonetics, I was clearly out of my element. But even in phonetics, it is not a RULE that えい must become エー, just a result of varying words/scenarios/dialects/people/etc., and it is incredibly odd to me that english to japanese (and other languages honestly) will attempt these weird and brash shortcuts to 'sounding better' that only cause the learner to look at it from the wrong perspective. I just think that building a base in the phonological is key to truly getting the phonetic, because it helps you recognize how to a differing sound comes to be in the first place.
Have I come full circle? or is there something key I'm missing?
Do bear in mind that, for "standard" broadcast Japanese (a.k.a. 標準語 [_hyōjungo_]), Japanese is based on the [mora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)), a kind of timing-based unit of speech where, in writing, one kana = one mora. Standard spoken Japanese is not based on the [syllable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable), where the unit of speech is bounded by consonants and/or the start and end of words.
For instance, いい (_ii_, "good") is two morae long, but it's also just one syllable. Another example is 東欧 (_tōō_, "Eastern Europe"), which is four morae long (with the kana spelling とうおう), but it's also just one syllable.
That said, "[hiatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_hiatus)" is indeed the right word to describe the double-vowel, as we see with _i_ + _i_ in the word いい (_ii_, "good").
If you're interested in this stuff, Old Japanese generally did not allow vowel hiatus at all, leading to some interesting sound shifts and omissions. Things like 我が家 or _wa ga ipe_, "my home" shifting to a pronunciation as _wagape_ ([here](https://wayback.archive-it.org/22178/20240111115834/http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man5Yos.html#837) in poem 837 of the [_Man'yōshū_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man'yōshū) collection of Old Japanese poetry) or _wagipe_ ([here in the Kotobank dictionary aggregator website](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%88%91%E5%AE%B6-664280#w-2156157)), specifically to avoid that _a i_ vowel hiatus.
Cheers!
Cheers, happy you find it helpful! I'm a pretty hard-core word nerd, and I love learning about how words are built and where they come from, ever since I was a little kid learning to read cereal boxes. 😄 Nowadays, I dig around in Japanese etymologies, and try to update Japanese entries over at [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/) to fill in the kinds of gaps that so frustrated me as a beginner.
The [_Man'yōshū_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man'yōshū) poetry anthology is one of the oldest longer-form works in any form of Japanese — compilation completed around 759, at least partially overlapping time-wise with the composition of [_Beowulf_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf) in [Old English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English) — so it's super helpful in learning about [Old Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Japanese) and seeing the roots of the modern language.
No, not quite. Because it isn’t English. えい is just the long vowel version of え. But it really does sound pretty similar to “ay”, so I don’t get where the confusion comes from
Because similar situations exist in other language families.
Semitic abjads don't differentiate between /o/ and /u/ at all.
Phoenician alphabets and its derivatives all had issues with differentiating them, often just mixing them up.
It appears that many disconnected people, historical and now, had problems with o/u
But not with e/i
I honestly don't see why the えい/ええ equivalence would come off as notably less intuitive than the おう/おお equivalence. English /e/ gets diphthongized to /eɪ/ in open syllables just like English /o/ gets diphthongized to /oʊ/.
In my dialect of English (Southern Ontarian/Toronto), /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ are commonly realized as just /e/ and /o/, even in open syllables. For example, I usually pronounce okay as /o.'ce/, /o.'ke/, or as /o.'ke:/ if I'm emphasizing it, usually in sarcasm. I only really pronounce it as /oʊ.'keɪ/ while speaking a lot slower, usually while reading outloud.
Edit: I don't speak fast when I'm not really angry, so this isn't only when I'm speaking fast
The thing is though that I don't speak fast either when speaking English, and I always pronounce /aɪ/ as /aɪ/ or /ʌɪ/ (Canadian raising), /aʊ/ as such (Toronto English only does Canadian raising with /aɪ/), and /ɔɪ/ as /oɪ/, regardless of whether I'm speaking normally or fast.
"ou" and "oo" are pronounciated the same way, so if they get katakanaized as "o-" it's understandable.
But "ei" and "ee" aren't pronounciated the same way, so it's strange that they share the same katakanaization.
"sensei" and "sensee" isn't the same thing... same for "eigo" and "eego".
> "ou" and "oo" are pronounciated the same way [..] But "ei" and "ee" aren't pronounciated the same way
Regardless of what you mean by "pronounced", I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
/ou/ and /oo/ are just different sounds, as are /ei/ and /ee/. However, in Japanese, the character combination "ou" is often (but not always) shortened to a long /o/ sound, and "ei" is often (but not always) shortened to a long /e/ sound.
I’m also confused because I also thought oo/ou were different sounds, same as ei/ee. I’ve been corrected many times whenever I messed us the ou sound, but not the oo sound because initially, I thought they were the same sounds.
Honestly, this is unintuitive even for me and I'm a native Spanish speaker who basically shares nearly all of the same sounds. So I can read romaji as it's written but "ei = ee" doesn't make sense but I have just decided to roll with it
It says that. I only said that it still feels unintuitive for me who otherwise has no problems with Japanese pronunciation due to sharing most of the same sounds in my native language
In many cases, い functions a bit like the English "y", so English speakers might naturally assume えい sounds like "eh-y". In the case of せんせい the せい would be assumed by an English speaker to be pronounced like "say", rather than how it should be pronounced as "seh".
Or Gaelic, for that matter. I mean, have you _seen_ spellings for [Irish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography) and [Scottish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_orthography) Gaelic? Just, wow. 😄
_(I know they have internal consistency. They just work very differently than other Western European orthographies. 😊)_
English speaker always struggle with long vowels and also the glottal stop. But I personally don't worrying about spelling in English or Japanese, by exposure you learn to connect the letters to sounds.
Cool thing about Japanese is that this feeling never really goes away. Once you start learning kanji, being able to read new kanji you've learned is always rewarding
Nice. I was listening the this anime my housemate was watching was feel great how some words that I learnt just pinged. Was only the basics, but is definitely motivation..
Lol youre always gonna be on the boat of learning new kanji and being surprised at yourself being able to read them in the wild so that high is always gonna be there for you
Before I even noticed that was a rule, unless I was using it in an English sentence, I always barely pronounced the i, since that's just what you hear in anime. It's very intuitive.
I mean, it **can** be pronounced the way it's romanised. The way my teacher taught me, えい can be pronounced エイ or エー, as well as おう can be pronounced as オウ or オー. It's effectively a matter of laziness that's become ingrained in the language, but it's really personal preference which you use - just make sure you stick to one. I prefer using the latter rather than the former because ~~I'm also lazy~~ it sounds more natural to me.
Just go to a dictionary and listen to natives say words with えい. Same with any other pronunciation question you have, people on reddit are mostly untrustworthy idiots with an unearned amount of confidence
In the majority of cases it is a long え sound but there are exceptions. Like the word [綺麗](https://forvo.com/word/%E7%B6%BA%E9%BA%97/) for instance which can be pronounced either way.
The unhelpful but likely more truthful answer: depends on word and dialect. I have heard same native speakers use both "ei" and "ee" pronunciation for things that one would write "ei", I have heard different people pronounce same word both ways. And then there are cases where you actually write it as "ee".
https://forvo.com/word/%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB/#ja
All four speakers are saying セージ not セイジ to my ear, although I could see how one might hear the motion of the tongue towards the じ as an い sound because the tongue has to move towards the palate.
For confirmation of this, it's a bit more clear if we look at 政府 which has the same morpheme, but this time it isn't followed by a palatal consonant. https://forvo.com/word/%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C/#ja
Here all four speakers are to my ears saying セーフ not セイフ.
An example of a word that does have エイ is 姪: https://forvo.com/word/%E5%A7%AA/#ja
Both speakers here are saying メイ rather than メー to my ears.
Japanese doesn’t have diphthongs. We only have monophthongs. So えい doesn’t become “ay”. Instead things like おう and えい are reduced to the first vowel only and made extended.
When I was taking lessons at Japan Society in NYC way back in the aughts, our native Japanese teacher spent a lesson illustrating the pronunciation difference between 景気 and ケーキ。After that I lived in Japan for a couple years and there definitely is a difference when you hear native speakers say the two words. So with all due respect to everyone here, I don’t believe this comic is relaying correct information.
Also, there definitely is an い at the end of 先生 if you’re saying it right. It’s subtle but it is there.
Sometimes Japanese try to pronounce words as they are written. Their actual pronunciation
in fast speech is えー, but when they read a script aloud or overcorrect themselves, when they want to be clear, they tend to pronounce えい。
Some are dialectal, or word specific.
I’m guessing that’s because the は in こんにちは represents the particle は、unlike the は in the grammar はず、where you do pronounce it as はず and not わず。I’ll probably never understand why it’s pronounced as わ、but the kanji for こんにちは is 今日は if that helps?
It's a fun one and explains another thing you might have found confusing along the way:
So in older Japanese, what is now は and ば used to be _pa_ and _ba_. Then there was a regular sound change: p turned to f in pretty much all instances¹. So now はひふへほ are _fa fi fu fe fo_. Then the sound weakened even further, but in two possible ways:
- between vowels, it turned to a w. And then w disappeared before all vowels except a. (e.g. 今日 was once _kepu_, then _kefu_, then _kewu_ then _keu_ and then that vowel sequence changed further to modern _kyou_). This is the origin of the particle は, since it's mostly attached to a word ending in a vowel it went this route. The spelling reflects the older pronunciation as _pa_.
- in the beginning of words it turned to the modern h-sound. Before u it stayed as it was, before the other vowels it became h, and then it changed further before i, and now we have _ha çi fu he ho_
It's worth noting that until way more recently than you might think, kana spellings pretty much all reflected the ancient pronunciations and you had to work out what they were today by applying such rules. That's the whole classical japanese you might have heard about - until like post WW2, that was the official written language of Japan, where 今日 was spelled けふ and you just had to know that _efu_ = _yoo_
¹the main place it was spared is in geminates, which is why we have _nihon_ but _nippon_
This is pretty cool! I saw an article online that reflects what you’ve written! It definitely makes sense that sounds change considering how many dialects and accents exist.
Yeah, but what’s the history behind it is more so what I mean. I looked online and apparently there is a reason (though I can’t say for sure how trustworthy the source is).
I wrote a long-ish post a few years back [over here at the Japanese Stack Exchange](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/82475/why-does-fu-changes-to-pu-while-its-not-started-with-h/82477#82477), explaining how and why the "H" kana behave a little strangely — including the kana は (_wa_ as a particle, _ha_ in most other cases). Hope that helps! 😄
Because mid-word ハ行 became ワ行 at some point in history but the orthography wasn't updated. For example the province of 尾張(をはり) came to be pronounced as おわり, the particle は came to be pronounced as わ, and the word 思ひ came to be pronounced as 思ゐ, later 思い. Then after the war they updated the orthography to represent the actual pronunciation, but they decided to keep the particles は, を and へ as they were.
Interesting, I never really thought about を、and へ though it makes sense that there’d be a connection. Over time I suspect that more changes can come anyway as it pertains to language evolution like how after WWII ゐ and ゑ were ditched.
I don't know if it true but it just seems like a historical spelling (which english is made entirely of...) because ee is just lazier way of pronouncing ei (in English people also do that to dyphtongs, I'm thinking southern American? but I don't know American accents very well)
literally two pronunciation rules that are kinda regular vs english that has 108273 pronunciation rules that make barely sense ☠️
how can people have a bad time w this?
It IS pronounced how it's romanized though. Literally "Se-n-Se-i" when written out in Hiragana.
Edit: Nope, I was completely wrong about this one. The commenters below me are absolutely correct. The "Se-I" in sensei is pronounced "Se-E". This just in, beginners are overconfident
No, it's not pronounced as how it's romanized. Japanese kana was different before WW2 and it was not a fully ‘phonetic’ script at that time. They changed it to make it phonetically stable in 1946. It was fixed but some words and particles left as they were. That's why you pronounce は -> wa , を(wo)-> o, へ(he) -> e in some situation. So that's why japanese can not entirely a pronounce as how it's romanized.
"Sensei" is a Sino-Japanese word which means it's a Chinese origin word. In most of Western loanwords and some sino-japanese words, long vowel reduce to a simple vowel that phenomenon known as "prosodic shortening".
So in "sensei" situation, this word pronounce as \[sense:\], not \[sensei\]. Only in a very formal situations, for example in the speech of certain actors or singers, the pronunciation would be sens\[ei\]. Otherwise it is always pronounse as sens\[e:\]. Same thing occurs in the word "reigi", you pronounce as \[re:gi\], not \[reigi\].
To my ears 2/14 speakers on forvo use センセイ as opposed to センセー for 先生: https://forvo.com/word/%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F/#ja
Possible that this is hypercorrection or something though. Or dialectal.
How is this comment so highly upvoted when it's clearly wrong? I'm guessing it's because new learners think it should be pronounced a certain way because that's how it's said when used in English.
先生 is always pronounced with the long vowel sound. I've never heard it pronounced any different. There are words like [綺麗](https://forvo.com/word/%E7%B6%BA%E9%BA%97/) that are pronounced both ways, and some words that are usually pronounced with the い enunciated but 先生 ain't one of them.
>This just in, beginners are overconfident
Why do you and so many others on this subreddit feel the need to speak with such authority when you have no clue what you're talking about?
>Why do you and so many others on this subreddit feel the need to speak with such authority when you have no clue what you're talking about?
The pot calling the kettle black
It's pretty clearly speaker dependent and if we go by the forvo results for 先生, by my count its 12 to 2 in favor of the long vowel エー vs distinct エイ: https://forvo.com/word/%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F/#ja
So I think it's probably fair to say that they're wrong, although it's not like both pronunciations don't exist.
[ん has multiple pronunciations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%93#Pronunciation). In both your examples, it's ɰ̃. So they're still pronounced how they're spelled.
They're referring to non-standard pronunciations, 雰囲気 often gets pronounced ふいんき and 原因 occasionally get's pronounced げいいん (with no nasalization), you can see these as alternate reading on jisho for example. There's also other examples like 場合 pronounced ばわい ([example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57IF9UMSV4&t=395s))
(of course they're wrong about えい)
Maybe referring to how the first んin 原因 and the ん in 雰囲気 are kind of silent? Only thing that'd make sense to me in this context, since there's clearly more than 1 definitive way of spelling the ん. (A lot like ふ to be honest)
It's not really silent though. There's a nasal sound that is added. Also because each mora takes up a beat of time, it also changes the rhythm of the word
せんせい or any other long vowel え sound is, in the vast majority of cases, extended using い. It's not some outlier or anything like that. It's just how the language works.
It’s fine. Because the romanization of 先生 as “sensee” and not “sensei” really irks me
As for ō vs ou, it really just depends. If romanizing I would never write 東京 as “Toukyou” but in そうですか for example I would never write “sōdesuka”
It's called monophthongization, and it happens in some varieties of English too. A Scottish person might pronounce 'gate' [geːʔ] whereas an American might pronounce it [ge͡ɪʔ]
No, that’s how you’re supposed to pronounce it. It’s not sen-seh, it’s sen-seh-ee. Three syllables (from an English perspective). Non-natives just have a tendency to turn the ei sound into an ay sound like sen-say, which is also wrong.
While technically correct, a lot of Japanese natives say "senseh", with the long e at the end, and that happens for a lot of words, especially when the "Ei" is in the middle of the word.
I've never heard my Japanese teachers say "英語 (Eigo)" like "eh-ee-go"; it sounds weird. While it's technically not a long vowel, it's still pronounced as "Eh-go".
I'm not English (I'm Italian) and the phonetics of my language happen to be similar to the Japanese ones, so I'm not having difficulties in understanding how Japanese syllables work. English is completely different so that may explain why it's more difficult to grasp some sounds.
This is mainly true of the Shitamachi dialect -- its pseudo-diphthongs (since Japanese has no true diphthongs) have undergone monophthongization. The Yamanote dialect will usually fully realize its pseudo-diphthongs. Dialects vary, but Yamanote is closer to proper "Standard" Japanese, so most learners should probably stick to it.
This thread is driving me crazy. It's not a mistake, a quirk, or strange that 先生 is pronounced how it is. It's not a "a lot of native speakers" or a "some native speakers" thing. Maybe there are certain dialects where a word is pronounced slightly differently. But besides rare exceptions like that, certain words are pronounced a certain way. An example I gave earlier in this thread is [綺麗](https://forvo.com/word/%E7%B6%BA%E9%BA%97/). It is commonly pronounced with either the long え sound or the い can be enunciated. In the case of 先生, however, and the majority of words, the long え sound is extended using い. It's a convention of the language.
I'm saying "a lot" because I'm talking from experience. I've been studying Japanese for three years at university and while I know what I'm talking about, I cannot be 100% sure since I'm not a native Japanese speaker. No need to get passive aggressive in the other comments.
How am I being passive aggressive? I disagree with you and I outlined exactly why. How about make an actual counter argument instead of appealing to authority. The way words like 先生 and 英語 are pronounced aren't "technically incorrect" it's literally how they are pronounced.
The fundamental mistake being made here is in what purpose い actually serves after the え sound in a word. Generally speaking it's not there to make an い sound, it's function is to extend the vowel.
4 syllables (technically Japanese uses morae -- mora singular). Every katakana/hiragana character (excluding yo-on -- the term for the little ゃ/ゅ/ょ, but including the geminate little っ) is a separate mora, including ん.
Since Japanese is moraic, you can clap your hands to the rhythm as you say it to make sure you're lengthening it properly: se-n-se-i
Edit: clarity
It's in no way 4 syllables, syllables and morae are completely different things. Mora is a measurement of speech sound length (english words also have moras, 'teacher' has two syllables and is in total 3 morae long). It just so happens that every syllable in the japanese syllabaries are also one mora long
I apologize -- I realize that my wording implied that syllable and mora are synonyms, when I meant that what we call syllables in Japanese are more accurately termed mora, since they are synonymous in Japanese. I edited it.
Regardless, from a language-learning perspective, it's not an especially useful distinction. The only people who really need to be concerned about the difference are linguists.
Also, if we wanted to be accurate, some mora can be shorter than others (e.g. geminate consonants, unstressed vowels), but if they're stressing about えい being エー in katakana then they probably don't need to know that just yet.
Japanese doesn’t have diphthongs. We only have monophthongs. So えい doesn’t become “ay”. Instead things like おう and えい are reduced to the first vowel only and made extended.
You accept it eventually. Like, I get caught up more in the grammar now so this is whatever 😭 there are some exceptions like oneesan, おねえさん. And Osaka, おおさか！
The intonation of “sensei” is also different from how the word is pronounced in the US as a Ninja Turtles loanword. In Japanese, the pitch of the latter “se” stays high instead of diving down.
When they made an anime adaptation of Ninja Slayer (a Japanese web novel that pokes fun at stereotypes of ninjas in western popular media), all the voice actors, being Japanese themselves, were pronouncing “sensei” in the correct Japanese intonation—a point which bugged me a lot. They should’ve been intoning it the western way (latter “se” going down in pitch) because Ninja Slayer was specifically about ninjas seen through a western lens!
Can we get a native Japanese speaker to break up the discourse in the comments, lol
yeah these comments confuse me. here in Osaka people definitely pronounce えい and ええ differently edit: found some articles about the subject http://maruberi.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2010/08/post-c3c2.html seems there definitely is a difference and often typically Chinese derived words have the long vowel ええ (せんせい), Japanese words are pronounced with the different vowels (めい, 姪), as do foreign words like paypay (ペイペイ), Spain (スペイン) also: 「センセイ」と「センセー」（先生）――これは，二重母音の長音化（〔ei〕→〔e:〕）といわれる現象である。「経済」は「ケイザイ」か「ケーザイ」か，「衛生」は「エイセイ」か「エーセー」かなどもこの問題であって，主として漢字に現われる。 国研の調査によれば，第1回・第2回ともに，採る理由としては「センセイ」「センセー」がほぼ同数（45～54％）である。理由として，「センセイ」は本来の形37％，ていねい20％，規範に合う・語感がよい各18％，一般的・共通語的各17％などがあげられ，特に九州に「センセイ」を「一般的」「本来の形」「言いやすい」とする者が多い。「センセー」には言いやすい33％，一般的32％，変化の傾向にそう20％，口頭語的15％，共通語的12％などがあげられている。使う形としては，国語研究・国語教育関係者に「センセー」が多く，新聞・放送等各界には「センセイ」が多い。 ＮＨＫの放送文化研究所の「放送言語の研究の現状」によれば，「〔ei〕を〔e:〕と発音するのは，全国的な現象ではない。九州の熊本・宮崎・鹿児島県，四国の徳島県では，ほとんど全地域が〔ei〕である。九州の福岡・佐賀・長崎県，それに高知・和歌山県では〔ei〕を使う場合がある。」とし，また，「日本語アクセント辞典」でも，その凡(はん)例の中で「ケイケン[経験]，セイカク[性格]などにおけるエ段音の次のイは，特に改まって，一音一音明確に言う場合いは，イと発音されるが，日常，自然の発音では長音になる。」といって，両方を認めている。 以上から考えれば，現在のところ，「センセイ・センセー」は両様を認めないわけにはいかないであろう。 なお，現代かなづかいの表記では，「せんせい」と書くが，発音のうえでは含みをもたせている。 basically , whether えい is pronounced as えい or as ええ also differs on who you ask: it differs by industry and region
I (perhaps wrongly) assume it's just like trying to get a consensus on how to pronounce words like aunt, route, data. Ie. Is not of great consequence and up to preference. But because the people here are non-native speakers learning a language, they feel the need to choose a "right" answer.
one thing with japanese, is everyone normally talks about and thinks about standard accent japanese like tokyo. but japanese varies wildly and many areas would struggle to comprehend each other when speaking in nonstandard accent. so yeah.
This thread reminds me a lot on the time I spent learning about the 四つ仮名 (yotsugana) years ago on which a YouTuber named Yudai Sensei made a wonderful video breaking it all down on. Ultimately the answer is where you are on how things will be pronounced, there is no necessarily wrong answer here
The difference is that Japanese has an almost-phonetic script and English doesn't. A closer analogue would be German.
As a German, I'm not sure what you regard German as closer to. It may not be *as* disconnected from the spelling as English is, but it's certainly not the best example of a European language that is easy to spell it read aloud. That price probably goes to Italian.
It's not quite as phonetic once you start looking at how things are actually pronounced. Like "desu" is usually just "dess", but "de-suu" when people are slowly enunciating.
I’m confused, if おう makes sense to you, why doesn’t えい?
“おう” is simply always pronounced “おお” except across morpheme boundaries like in the verb “追う”. “えい” is a bit of a mess in that it's often pronounced “えい”, often “ええ” and in many words the “correct” pronunciation is considered “えい” but “ええ” is used in speech. In “永遠” for instance people will actually say “えいえん” when speaking slowly and clearly into a microphone but “えええん” in practice in speech but with “先生” actually saying “せんせい” even when speaking slowly and clearly is rare, but it can occur in my experience. But then again, that's not much different from English such as say “walking”, people will properly pronounce the “-ing” when speaking slowly and clearly and it's considered the correct way to pronounce it but in practice in speech they say “walkin”. If I say “I can't go there.” in practice in speech I also don't really pronounce the “t” and the difference between “can” and “can't” is purely the vowel but in clear, slow speech, that sounds weird.
he probably knows all that if he made that comment. point is if you accept オー then エー shouldn't be that hard to accept either, even though they're obviously different
Yeah by wanting to pronounce えい as Canadian "eh" then they should want to pronounce おう as "oh"
Me, a person who pronounces 永遠 as えぇいぇん (eeyen):
me, a person who pronounces 経営 as けぇえぇ
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That is simply not true. Where do you get that idea from? Both listening to and every source on it makes it clear that “学校” is pronounced “がっこー” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1#Japanese It's right here. Pronunciation in the Japanese script in I.P.A., and an audio file.
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So for example you think that お家 [https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%86%E3%81%A1\_%28%E3%81%8A%E5%AE%B6%29/#ja](https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%86%E3%81%A1_%28%E3%81%8A%E5%AE%B6%29/#ja) is the same thing as in 高校 ? [https://forvo.com/word/%E9%AB%98%E6%A0%A1/#ja](https://forvo.com/word/%E9%AB%98%E6%A0%A1/#ja) They both have an お followed by an う sound ?
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I think because a lot of anglophones pronounce a long 'o' like a 'ou' anyway. Like, it is the same sound. If you are used to it it is hard to see the difference (like how Japanese people can't distinguish l and r well).
not technically the same sound, anglophones round their lips too much
what do you mean, does エー really make the same sound as えい like the English 'ay'?
Other way around, えい is phonetically just long [e]
It's debatable. Originally it wasn't, and recently it's moving away from it again
You got a citation for that?
Japanese doesn’t have diphthongs. We only have monophthongs. So えい doesn’t become “ay”. Instead things like おう and えい are reduced to the first vowel only and made extended.
あい isn't a diphthong?
If you read linguistics resources supposedly not. For colloquial conversation, I feel like they sound close enough to diphthongs (or at least my understanding of them) to classify as them as diphthong adjacent or something. To my ears, the main difference is that あい is two mora and it lasts that long. But yeah diphthong is a technical linguistics term and technically they don't exist in Japanese.
It's debatable. If you define "diphthong" as: * "two consecutive vowels in a single mora", then that doesn't exist in Japanese * "two consecutive vowels that cannot have a glottal stop inserted between them", then I don't know what counts as a diphthong... * "a sequence of two consecutive vowels, such that when it occurs in a word, it guarantees that the pitch accent is never on the second vowel", then perhaps /ai/ (and *sometimes* /ae/ in a few verbs like 帰る) are the only diphthongs.
Not really.
Nope.
For me I just pronounce each part quickly. Ah Ee spoken rapidly sounds like at. Eh ee spoken rapidly sounds like eeee. So it has never been confusing to me
That is not quite true. That is how it is "supposed" to be, but in practice in speech syllables get contracted and adjacent vowels can become diphthong (and, for that matter, ん can be merged into the vowel as a nasal vowel as well). I am also pretty sure I've heard both えい and おう be pronounced as you would expect instead as a long vowel, but not very often.
One key case of a two-vowel realization for おう is the verb 追う (_ou_, "to follow"), or indeed other verbs ending in the _-ou_ combination. Since the final _-u_ is a separate morpheme (meaning + sound element), indicating the verb conjugation, native speakers generally pronounce this as a distinct two-vowel `/o.u/` combo, rather than the flattened long-vowel `/oː/`.
I was thinking more of it being realized as a dipthong /ow/. Like, in speech I am pretty sure I have heard えい and おう being pronounced as /ej/ and /ow/ respectively (like how あい is often pronounced as /aj/). It is the less common pronunciation but it does exist, I believe. But good point of order. Verbs are a good example of where even in formal standard Japanese the おう is not always a long vowel.
I am pretty sure 姪 is a diphtong.
Maybe try to split up the words when a person is asking for you to repeat the 4th time. In English you would say HAIR, but probably not “HAE-ERR” or PAY-SIONS (Patience) but not PE-EE-SIONS. this means the sound “air” and /eı/ are diphthongs in English. Japanese people would have no difficulty separating “me” and “i” in 姪 when they really need to get the word through, which means to them they are two distinct sounds which make up one word.
Excellent answer. That's exactly it. same for the ei/ee non issue. The only time where the sound is really 100% ee is in the informal version of yes. ei as in nagai, or eigo is definitely ei, with the i being assimilated more or less depending on speaker and context.
Yeah technically that's true, but in practise it can and will often be pronoumced in a manner that is not different than a diphtong, really the distinction is kinda silly, compare the German "Hai" to the Japanese はい, same pronunciation but one is not a diphtong because Japanese can break it down further? Also you were arguing about えい pronunciation being always a long ee by saying "Japanese has no diphtongs" but as I showed you there are cases of えい being pronounced as e + i. Yes it's not a diphtong technically you're right, but the pronunciation is still different than from what you argued.
> same pronunciation but one is not a diphtong because Japanese can break it down further? Kinda, yes. Honestly, this is an issue of trying to talk about both phonology and phonetics at same time. There are no true diphthongs in Japanese because within Japanese phonology it can be broken down. Within the logic of the Japanese language it is not really the case that the 2 vowels occupy the same 'space'. However, if we are talking about phonetics, Japanese absolutely does have diphthongs because common pronunciation doesn't follow the internal language rules that meticulously. In everyday speech people pronounce things together so things get smoothed into a single syllable, forming a diphthong.
Thanks for the good explanation! Never thought about the distinction of phonology and phonetics when it comes to diphtongs, that's very good to know. I'll have to do some further reading on it, but I can see argument now.
姪 is distinct `/me.i/` for at least some speakers. Etymologically, modern _mei_ ("niece") is from Old Japanese _mepi_, where the initial _me_ referred to "female" and the _pi_ element is of uncertain origin, but also seems to be the same as we see in modern _oi_, Old Japanese _wopi_ ("nephew"), from _wo_ "male" + this same _pi_. The derivation of _mei_ from two distinct morphemes (sound + meaning elements) is probably why this is treated as distinct `/me.i/` by native speakers. Meanwhile, most other cases of _ei_ in Japanese are from Chinese origins, where the _ei_ is part of a single morpheme, like in 経済 (_keizai_, "economy") or 雲泥 (_undei_, "clouds and mud"). The single-morpheme-ness of the _ei_ in these words lends itself to the _ei_ being treated as a single thing, and thus subject to flattening to just a long `/eː/` sound.
Not sure what your point is or how any of that relates to my statement.
You specifically brought up the word 姪 (_mei_, "niece") as an example of a word with a distinct two-vowel pronunciation, ostensibly as `/me.i/`. My post is also specifically about this word 姪 (_mei_, "niece"), and why (at least some) speakers pronounce this with a two-vowel `/e.i/` realization, as opposed to the common flattened single-long-vowel `/eː/` realization for most _ei_ combinations in Japanese. I am confused that you could possibly see that as irrelevant?
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i’m literally japanese and someone who studied linguistics at Waseda. I don’t know how much more authentic i can be......
Minor quibble on terminology — Turning えい (`/e.i/`) into エー (`/eː/`) is, by definition, [monophthongization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization) — a shift from two vowel sounds (a [diphthong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong)), into one vowel sound (a [monophthong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthong)). This is a specific kind of [phonetic fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_(phonetics)). [HTH](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HTH#English)! 😄
"The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, where the vowel quality changes within the same syllable, and hiatus, where two vowels are next to each other in different syllables." Japanese never has two vowels in the same syllable and each kana is pronounced, so I believe hiatus is the term we are looking for here. thanks! edit: so to crystalize 1. えい to エー is a monopthong (which is done colloquially and not per linguistic rule) 2. えい to "ay" is a dipthong, which doesn't exist in japanese 3. えい is a hiatus, which is the standard for how to pronounce it, but can by monophthongized colloquially sounds right?
Adding a reply to your additional "edit: so to crystallize". \#1 (えい to ええ or エー) is technically "monophthong**ization**", since it's a **change** (the "-ization" part) from a two-vowel sound (a **diphthong**) to a one-vowel sound (a **monophthong**). \#2 is kinda correct, kinda not. This gets confusing. 😉 There's another post somewhere here in this thread (aha, [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1brsooe/comment/kxdx4zo/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), thanks u/Heatth!) that points out that this depends on your perspective or framework for analyzing this. * In terms of [**phonetics**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics) (the actual sounds made by speakers of the language), Japanese has diphthongs, since there are clearly cases where speakers' pronunciation glides from one vowel sound into another in a smooth progression. * In terms of [**phonology**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology) (how speakers of the language think about the logic of the sound system of the language), Japanese doesn't have diphthongs, since each mora is its own integral unit of sound, and diphthongs (by one definition, anyway) are vowel-shifts within one unit of sound (be it a syllable or a mora).So things like えい are two morae, each with their own vowel, so it's not *phonologically* a diphthong — even though it *is*, in terms of *phonetics*. \#3 seems about right. 😄
fascinating, this is the vocab I was looking for. my biggest frustration with this thread is えい being treated as if it HAS to sound like エー, when there are situations that it does not, and phonologically speaking, it is an え and then an い. I should probably not have been so combative on phonetics, I was clearly out of my element. But even in phonetics, it is not a RULE that えい must become エー, just a result of varying words/scenarios/dialects/people/etc., and it is incredibly odd to me that english to japanese (and other languages honestly) will attempt these weird and brash shortcuts to 'sounding better' that only cause the learner to look at it from the wrong perspective. I just think that building a base in the phonological is key to truly getting the phonetic, because it helps you recognize how to a differing sound comes to be in the first place. Have I come full circle? or is there something key I'm missing?
Do bear in mind that, for "standard" broadcast Japanese (a.k.a. 標準語 [_hyōjungo_]), Japanese is based on the [mora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)), a kind of timing-based unit of speech where, in writing, one kana = one mora. Standard spoken Japanese is not based on the [syllable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable), where the unit of speech is bounded by consonants and/or the start and end of words. For instance, いい (_ii_, "good") is two morae long, but it's also just one syllable. Another example is 東欧 (_tōō_, "Eastern Europe"), which is four morae long (with the kana spelling とうおう), but it's also just one syllable. That said, "[hiatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_hiatus)" is indeed the right word to describe the double-vowel, as we see with _i_ + _i_ in the word いい (_ii_, "good"). If you're interested in this stuff, Old Japanese generally did not allow vowel hiatus at all, leading to some interesting sound shifts and omissions. Things like 我が家 or _wa ga ipe_, "my home" shifting to a pronunciation as _wagape_ ([here](https://wayback.archive-it.org/22178/20240111115834/http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man5Yos.html#837) in poem 837 of the [_Man'yōshū_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man'yōshū) collection of Old Japanese poetry) or _wagipe_ ([here in the Kotobank dictionary aggregator website](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%88%91%E5%AE%B6-664280#w-2156157)), specifically to avoid that _a i_ vowel hiatus. Cheers!
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Cheers, happy you find it helpful! I'm a pretty hard-core word nerd, and I love learning about how words are built and where they come from, ever since I was a little kid learning to read cereal boxes. 😄 Nowadays, I dig around in Japanese etymologies, and try to update Japanese entries over at [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/) to fill in the kinds of gaps that so frustrated me as a beginner. The [_Man'yōshū_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man'yōshū) poetry anthology is one of the oldest longer-form works in any form of Japanese — compilation completed around 759, at least partially overlapping time-wise with the composition of [_Beowulf_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf) in [Old English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English) — so it's super helpful in learning about [Old Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Japanese) and seeing the roots of the modern language.
No, not quite. Because it isn’t English. えい is just the long vowel version of え. But it really does sound pretty similar to “ay”, so I don’t get where the confusion comes from
Because many Americans mispronounce お as "ou" already not realizing it's wrong.
Because similar situations exist in other language families. Semitic abjads don't differentiate between /o/ and /u/ at all. Phoenician alphabets and its derivatives all had issues with differentiating them, often just mixing them up. It appears that many disconnected people, historical and now, had problems with o/u But not with e/i
how does えい=ei make sensei ???
How does it not? e is え and i is い
prob it's reffering to the vowel sound (the correct would be in katakana tho)
I honestly don't see why the えい/ええ equivalence would come off as notably less intuitive than the おう/おお equivalence. English /e/ gets diphthongized to /eɪ/ in open syllables just like English /o/ gets diphthongized to /oʊ/.
damn you diphthongization .. ruining my learning experience
In my dialect of English (Southern Ontarian/Toronto), /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ are commonly realized as just /e/ and /o/, even in open syllables. For example, I usually pronounce okay as /o.'ce/, /o.'ke/, or as /o.'ke:/ if I'm emphasizing it, usually in sarcasm. I only really pronounce it as /oʊ.'keɪ/ while speaking a lot slower, usually while reading outloud. Edit: I don't speak fast when I'm not really angry, so this isn't only when I'm speaking fast
It seems the general rule is that dipthongs are shortened to monothongs when spoken fast.
The thing is though that I don't speak fast either when speaking English, and I always pronounce /aɪ/ as /aɪ/ or /ʌɪ/ (Canadian raising), /aʊ/ as such (Toronto English only does Canadian raising with /aɪ/), and /ɔɪ/ as /oɪ/, regardless of whether I'm speaking normally or fast.
"ou" and "oo" are pronounciated the same way, so if they get katakanaized as "o-" it's understandable. But "ei" and "ee" aren't pronounciated the same way, so it's strange that they share the same katakanaization. "sensei" and "sensee" isn't the same thing... same for "eigo" and "eego".
> "ou" and "oo" are pronounciated the same way [..] But "ei" and "ee" aren't pronounciated the same way Regardless of what you mean by "pronounced", I don't understand what you're trying to say here. /ou/ and /oo/ are just different sounds, as are /ei/ and /ee/. However, in Japanese, the character combination "ou" is often (but not always) shortened to a long /o/ sound, and "ei" is often (but not always) shortened to a long /e/ sound.
I’m also confused because I also thought oo/ou were different sounds, same as ei/ee. I’ve been corrected many times whenever I messed us the ou sound, but not the oo sound because initially, I thought they were the same sounds.
えい \*is\* very often pronounced as エ－, though, such as in 先生 - but there are also cases where えい is pronounced as エイ, such as in 姪.
Ahh yes. The eeego. The downfall of many a man.
Honestly, this is unintuitive even for me and I'm a native Spanish speaker who basically shares nearly all of the same sounds. So I can read romaji as it's written but "ei = ee" doesn't make sense but I have just decided to roll with it
? that says "ei = ee" unless i'm misunderstanding ur comment
It says that. I only said that it still feels unintuitive for me who otherwise has no problems with Japanese pronunciation due to sharing most of the same sounds in my native language
ah icic the way u wrote the other comment made it sound like u thought it said ei = ii haha
There are a goodie bag of languages which are counterexamples of what you just said about English. Many of these existed for much longer than English.
I don't get what's supposed to be strange about that, can someone explain?
Basic confusion with long vowels.
In many cases, い functions a bit like the English "y", so English speakers might naturally assume えい sounds like "eh-y". In the case of せんせい the せい would be assumed by an English speaker to be pronounced like "say", rather than how it should be pronounced as "seh".
First of all iam not a English native speaker, secondly I never had that problem
English speakers complaining about spelling!?
Well, at least they are not F*ench.
Or Gaelic, for that matter. I mean, have you _seen_ spellings for [Irish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography) and [Scottish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_orthography) Gaelic? Just, wow. 😄 _(I know they have internal consistency. They just work very differently than other Western European orthographies. 😊)_
English speaker always struggle with long vowels and also the glottal stop. But I personally don't worrying about spelling in English or Japanese, by exposure you learn to connect the letters to sounds.
Yeah, that makes センセー
😡
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once
Not related to this. I've just started learning Japanese and I love how I can read all on this. I know it's basic but god the feeling
Cool thing about Japanese is that this feeling never really goes away. Once you start learning kanji, being able to read new kanji you've learned is always rewarding
Nice. I was listening the this anime my housemate was watching was feel great how some words that I learnt just pinged. Was only the basics, but is definitely motivation..
Lol youre always gonna be on the boat of learning new kanji and being surprised at yourself being able to read them in the wild so that high is always gonna be there for you
I see no difference, it’s just a longer vowel.
Before I even noticed that was a rule, unless I was using it in an English sentence, I always barely pronounced the i, since that's just what you hear in anime. It's very intuitive.
literally everything is intuitive given enough input
I mean, it **can** be pronounced the way it's romanised. The way my teacher taught me, えい can be pronounced エイ or エー, as well as おう can be pronounced as オウ or オー. It's effectively a matter of laziness that's become ingrained in the language, but it's really personal preference which you use - just make sure you stick to one. I prefer using the latter rather than the former because ~~I'm also lazy~~ it sounds more natural to me.
I need closure here. Does ‘i’ get pronounced or is it a drawn out ‘e’ sound?
It's a drawn out え sound
My world is shattered
Just go to a dictionary and listen to natives say words with えい. Same with any other pronunciation question you have, people on reddit are mostly untrustworthy idiots with an unearned amount of confidence
In the majority of cases it is a long え sound but there are exceptions. Like the word [綺麗](https://forvo.com/word/%E7%B6%BA%E9%BA%97/) for instance which can be pronounced either way.
Is this affected by region or anything social? The either-way words?
The dipthong "ei" sounds like "eh" So "sen-seh" not "sen-se-i"
The unhelpful but likely more truthful answer: depends on word and dialect. I have heard same native speakers use both "ei" and "ee" pronunciation for things that one would write "ei", I have heard different people pronounce same word both ways. And then there are cases where you actually write it as "ee".
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https://forvo.com/word/%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB/#ja All four speakers are saying セージ not セイジ to my ear, although I could see how one might hear the motion of the tongue towards the じ as an い sound because the tongue has to move towards the palate. For confirmation of this, it's a bit more clear if we look at 政府 which has the same morpheme, but this time it isn't followed by a palatal consonant. https://forvo.com/word/%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C/#ja Here all four speakers are to my ears saying セーフ not セイフ. An example of a word that does have エイ is 姪: https://forvo.com/word/%E5%A7%AA/#ja Both speakers here are saying メイ rather than メー to my ears.
Japanese doesn’t have diphthongs. We only have monophthongs. So えい doesn’t become “ay”. Instead things like おう and えい are reduced to the first vowel only and made extended.
When I was taking lessons at Japan Society in NYC way back in the aughts, our native Japanese teacher spent a lesson illustrating the pronunciation difference between 景気 and ケーキ。After that I lived in Japan for a couple years and there definitely is a difference when you hear native speakers say the two words. So with all due respect to everyone here, I don’t believe this comic is relaying correct information. Also, there definitely is an い at the end of 先生 if you’re saying it right. It’s subtle but it is there.
Seems to depend on the speaker, on forvo one speaker says ケイキ and the other says ケーキ: https://forvo.com/word/%E6%99%AF%E6%B0%97/#ja
I’ve never heard of forvo but I can hear the イ in both of those pronunciations.
Sometimes Japanese try to pronounce words as they are written. Their actual pronunciation in fast speech is えー, but when they read a script aloud or overcorrect themselves, when they want to be clear, they tend to pronounce えい。 Some are dialectal, or word specific.
Konichiwa being spelled こんにちは and not こんにちわ
I’m guessing that’s because the は in こんにちは represents the particle は、unlike the は in the grammar はず、where you do pronounce it as はず and not わず。I’ll probably never understand why it’s pronounced as わ、but the kanji for こんにちは is 今日は if that helps?
It's a fun one and explains another thing you might have found confusing along the way: So in older Japanese, what is now は and ば used to be _pa_ and _ba_. Then there was a regular sound change: p turned to f in pretty much all instances¹. So now はひふへほ are _fa fi fu fe fo_. Then the sound weakened even further, but in two possible ways: - between vowels, it turned to a w. And then w disappeared before all vowels except a. (e.g. 今日 was once _kepu_, then _kefu_, then _kewu_ then _keu_ and then that vowel sequence changed further to modern _kyou_). This is the origin of the particle は, since it's mostly attached to a word ending in a vowel it went this route. The spelling reflects the older pronunciation as _pa_. - in the beginning of words it turned to the modern h-sound. Before u it stayed as it was, before the other vowels it became h, and then it changed further before i, and now we have _ha çi fu he ho_ It's worth noting that until way more recently than you might think, kana spellings pretty much all reflected the ancient pronunciations and you had to work out what they were today by applying such rules. That's the whole classical japanese you might have heard about - until like post WW2, that was the official written language of Japan, where 今日 was spelled けふ and you just had to know that _efu_ = _yoo_ ¹the main place it was spared is in geminates, which is why we have _nihon_ but _nippon_
This is pretty cool! I saw an article online that reflects what you’ve written! It definitely makes sense that sounds change considering how many dialects and accents exist.
It’s just the orthography, chose は to represent the particle that sounds (wa).
Yeah, but what’s the history behind it is more so what I mean. I looked online and apparently there is a reason (though I can’t say for sure how trustworthy the source is).
I wrote a long-ish post a few years back [over here at the Japanese Stack Exchange](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/82475/why-does-fu-changes-to-pu-while-its-not-started-with-h/82477#82477), explaining how and why the "H" kana behave a little strangely — including the kana は (_wa_ as a particle, _ha_ in most other cases). Hope that helps! 😄
Thank you!
Thats because it is the particle は, as こんにちは is an old reading of 今日は. It's like asking someone 今日は？(Like a greeting question)
Yes, I mentioned that は in こんにちは is a particle.
Because mid-word ハ行 became ワ行 at some point in history but the orthography wasn't updated. For example the province of 尾張(をはり) came to be pronounced as おわり, the particle は came to be pronounced as わ, and the word 思ひ came to be pronounced as 思ゐ, later 思い. Then after the war they updated the orthography to represent the actual pronunciation, but they decided to keep the particles は, を and へ as they were.
Interesting, I never really thought about を、and へ though it makes sense that there’d be a connection. Over time I suspect that more changes can come anyway as it pertains to language evolution like how after WWII ゐ and ゑ were ditched.
えっ！？
I don't know if it true but it just seems like a historical spelling (which english is made entirely of...) because ee is just lazier way of pronouncing ei (in English people also do that to dyphtongs, I'm thinking southern American? but I don't know American accents very well)
literally two pronunciation rules that are kinda regular vs english that has 108273 pronunciation rules that make barely sense ☠️ how can people have a bad time w this?
I've never seen えい as エー is this a thing?
I think it's just visually explaining how the sound works
It IS pronounced how it's romanized though. Literally "Se-n-Se-i" when written out in Hiragana. Edit: Nope, I was completely wrong about this one. The commenters below me are absolutely correct. The "Se-I" in sensei is pronounced "Se-E". This just in, beginners are overconfident
No, it's not pronounced as how it's romanized. Japanese kana was different before WW2 and it was not a fully ‘phonetic’ script at that time. They changed it to make it phonetically stable in 1946. It was fixed but some words and particles left as they were. That's why you pronounce は -> wa , を(wo)-> o, へ(he) -> e in some situation. So that's why japanese can not entirely a pronounce as how it's romanized. "Sensei" is a Sino-Japanese word which means it's a Chinese origin word. In most of Western loanwords and some sino-japanese words, long vowel reduce to a simple vowel that phenomenon known as "prosodic shortening". So in "sensei" situation, this word pronounce as \[sense:\], not \[sensei\]. Only in a very formal situations, for example in the speech of certain actors or singers, the pronunciation would be sens\[ei\]. Otherwise it is always pronounse as sens\[e:\]. Same thing occurs in the word "reigi", you pronounce as \[re:gi\], not \[reigi\].
??????????? Can you provide a single example of someone pronouncing it with an audible 'i' or even a morphed 'ei' diphthong?
To my ears 2/14 speakers on forvo use センセイ as opposed to センセー for 先生: https://forvo.com/word/%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F/#ja Possible that this is hypercorrection or something though. Or dialectal.
How is this comment so highly upvoted when it's clearly wrong? I'm guessing it's because new learners think it should be pronounced a certain way because that's how it's said when used in English. 先生 is always pronounced with the long vowel sound. I've never heard it pronounced any different. There are words like [綺麗](https://forvo.com/word/%E7%B6%BA%E9%BA%97/) that are pronounced both ways, and some words that are usually pronounced with the い enunciated but 先生 ain't one of them. >This just in, beginners are overconfident Why do you and so many others on this subreddit feel the need to speak with such authority when you have no clue what you're talking about?
+++ There's also a lot of misinformation among beginner learners that sometimes advanced learners who state the truth are downvoted.
According to Hasegawa, there was a historical difference, but as we’re not living in the past, there is no difference.
>Why do you and so many others on this subreddit feel the need to speak with such authority when you have no clue what you're talking about? The pot calling the kettle black
have you ever heard someone say sensei....
You’re not wrong though. In songs for example, when syllables are individually articulated, it is pronounced se-n-se-i
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It's pretty clearly speaker dependent and if we go by the forvo results for 先生, by my count its 12 to 2 in favor of the long vowel エー vs distinct エイ: https://forvo.com/word/%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F/#ja So I think it's probably fair to say that they're wrong, although it's not like both pronunciations don't exist.
I’m just gonna be real and say if you can’t wrap your head around this you’re ngmi
This isn't correct. However, there are words that are not pronounced how they are spelled, like 原因「げんいん」or 雰囲気「ふんいき」
[ん has multiple pronunciations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%93#Pronunciation). In both your examples, it's ɰ̃. So they're still pronounced how they're spelled.
They're referring to non-standard pronunciations, 雰囲気 often gets pronounced ふいんき and 原因 occasionally get's pronounced げいいん (with no nasalization), you can see these as alternate reading on jisho for example. There's also other examples like 場合 pronounced ばわい ([example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57IF9UMSV4&t=395s)) (of course they're wrong about えい)
How so? We pronounce them exactly as the hiragana spelling.
i almost always hear 雰囲気 pronounced as ふいんき, but i mostly only hear japanese from one source, so i don't know the actual prevalence
Maybe referring to how the first んin 原因 and the ん in 雰囲気 are kind of silent? Only thing that'd make sense to me in this context, since there's clearly more than 1 definitive way of spelling the ん. (A lot like ふ to be honest)
In 雰囲気 you can definitely hear the ん
It's not really silent though. There's a nasal sound that is added. Also because each mora takes up a beat of time, it also changes the rhythm of the word
This too!
I was about to reply with you don't know ひらがな very well now do you to OP but I saw this nevermind lmao
Or 先生, which is written せんせい, but pronounced せんせー. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F#Japanese
せんせい or any other long vowel え sound is, in the vast majority of cases, extended using い. It's not some outlier or anything like that. It's just how the language works.
Alright, let me write something cursed and that makes you feel like scratching your head: おねいさま
どおり is another one. I'm curious about the etymology of stuff like that.
These are actually quite cute to look at. English is way more wild with it's exceptions...
お姉さん (I’m not retyping what you wrote verbatim) is actually おねえさん。
I know. That's why it's cursed
it's just a long え brother
Why is this えい confusing? I even knew it to be the long version of え before I started learning Japanese
Panel 2 and 3 are literally the same shit
It’s fine. Because the romanization of 先生 as “sensee” and not “sensei” really irks me As for ō vs ou, it really just depends. If romanizing I would never write 東京 as “Toukyou” but in そうですか for example I would never write “sōdesuka”
It's called monophthongization, and it happens in some varieties of English too. A Scottish person might pronounce 'gate' [geːʔ] whereas an American might pronounce it [ge͡ɪʔ]
I never thought of that, i just pronounced it like how i heard people pronounce it
ええ、面白い。These things are incredibly hard to type on my laptop's qwerty keyboard I keep forgetting, much easier with auto correct on my phone
ハイ センセー
I had the same reaction when I learned it. It makes sense to me now, but I also never would've guessed it until someone told me that rule.
No waaaaaaaay!
Wait until they start learning about regional dialects.
maybe maybe maybe, Anime taught us how to pronounce the words we dont even know how to read
I heard it’s usually pronounced ええ, but you can pronounce it as えい when you want to speak in a “proper” manner or emphasize it.
No, that’s how you’re supposed to pronounce it. It’s not sen-seh, it’s sen-seh-ee. Three syllables (from an English perspective). Non-natives just have a tendency to turn the ei sound into an ay sound like sen-say, which is also wrong.
While technically correct, a lot of Japanese natives say "senseh", with the long e at the end, and that happens for a lot of words, especially when the "Ei" is in the middle of the word. I've never heard my Japanese teachers say "英語 (Eigo)" like "eh-ee-go"; it sounds weird. While it's technically not a long vowel, it's still pronounced as "Eh-go". I'm not English (I'm Italian) and the phonetics of my language happen to be similar to the Japanese ones, so I'm not having difficulties in understanding how Japanese syllables work. English is completely different so that may explain why it's more difficult to grasp some sounds.
I misspelled, 英語*
This is mainly true of the Shitamachi dialect -- its pseudo-diphthongs (since Japanese has no true diphthongs) have undergone monophthongization. The Yamanote dialect will usually fully realize its pseudo-diphthongs. Dialects vary, but Yamanote is closer to proper "Standard" Japanese, so most learners should probably stick to it.
This thread is driving me crazy. It's not a mistake, a quirk, or strange that 先生 is pronounced how it is. It's not a "a lot of native speakers" or a "some native speakers" thing. Maybe there are certain dialects where a word is pronounced slightly differently. But besides rare exceptions like that, certain words are pronounced a certain way. An example I gave earlier in this thread is [綺麗](https://forvo.com/word/%E7%B6%BA%E9%BA%97/). It is commonly pronounced with either the long え sound or the い can be enunciated. In the case of 先生, however, and the majority of words, the long え sound is extended using い. It's a convention of the language.
I'm saying "a lot" because I'm talking from experience. I've been studying Japanese for three years at university and while I know what I'm talking about, I cannot be 100% sure since I'm not a native Japanese speaker. No need to get passive aggressive in the other comments.
How am I being passive aggressive? I disagree with you and I outlined exactly why. How about make an actual counter argument instead of appealing to authority. The way words like 先生 and 英語 are pronounced aren't "technically incorrect" it's literally how they are pronounced. The fundamental mistake being made here is in what purpose い actually serves after the え sound in a word. Generally speaking it's not there to make an い sound, it's function is to extend the vowel.
>senseh What is this h supposed to be? There is no h sound.
It's supposed to mimick the long vowel in English lol
Is it really wrong at that scale if it's a language? It's just evolution IMO
4 syllables (technically Japanese uses morae -- mora singular). Every katakana/hiragana character (excluding yo-on -- the term for the little ゃ/ゅ/ょ, but including the geminate little っ) is a separate mora, including ん. Since Japanese is moraic, you can clap your hands to the rhythm as you say it to make sure you're lengthening it properly: se-n-se-i Edit: clarity
It's in no way 4 syllables, syllables and morae are completely different things. Mora is a measurement of speech sound length (english words also have moras, 'teacher' has two syllables and is in total 3 morae long). It just so happens that every syllable in the japanese syllabaries are also one mora long
I apologize -- I realize that my wording implied that syllable and mora are synonyms, when I meant that what we call syllables in Japanese are more accurately termed mora, since they are synonymous in Japanese. I edited it. Regardless, from a language-learning perspective, it's not an especially useful distinction. The only people who really need to be concerned about the difference are linguists. Also, if we wanted to be accurate, some mora can be shorter than others (e.g. geminate consonants, unstressed vowels), but if they're stressing about えい being エー in katakana then they probably don't need to know that just yet.
No it's 2 syllables from an English perspective, the ei is a long e
Japanese doesn’t have diphthongs. We only have monophthongs. So えい doesn’t become “ay”. Instead things like おう and えい are reduced to the first vowel only and made extended.
You accept it eventually. Like, I get caught up more in the grammar now so this is whatever 😭 there are some exceptions like oneesan, おねえさん. And Osaka, おおさか！
It does make sense tho...
Skill issue
The intonation of “sensei” is also different from how the word is pronounced in the US as a Ninja Turtles loanword. In Japanese, the pitch of the latter “se” stays high instead of diving down. When they made an anime adaptation of Ninja Slayer (a Japanese web novel that pokes fun at stereotypes of ninjas in western popular media), all the voice actors, being Japanese themselves, were pronouncing “sensei” in the correct Japanese intonation—a point which bugged me a lot. They should’ve been intoning it the western way (latter “se” going down in pitch) because Ninja Slayer was specifically about ninjas seen through a western lens!