![]() ![]() Loanwords are words directly taken from one language and integrated into another. When an English speaker is deciding whether to learn Japanese, they should absolutely be made aware of how common English loanwords are. If you’d like more information about Japanese pronunciation, check out this article. If you know the spelling, you’ll basically know the sound of the word, even if you’ve never heard it before! You don’t have to worry much whether the context changes the pronunciation, the way it does in English (like with cow vs. ![]() In Japanese, an “O” will always sound like “oh”. This is not even getting into the large variation of vowel sounds in English-despite there only being a few vowels, they comprise 20 out of 44 phonemes. Sometimes it sounds like a “K” (cat), and sometimes like an “S” (center). Not only this, but unlike English the phonemes in Japanese are consistent with the “letters”.įor example, in English the letter C can sound different depending on which word it’s in. English has 44 phonemes, and Japanese has 24. There’s evidence of this in the “phonemes”, or units of sound. It is not effortless, but compared to trying to learn the rolled “r” in Spanish or tones in Chinese, nothing in Japanese comes close. Japanese has perhaps one of the easiest pronunciations of any foreign language. ![]() However, there are many things to consider before giving up! While some aspects of the language can be quite challenging, reaching a level of communication you can be happy with might not be too far out of reach. Hearing that, you might be wondering if it would even be worth it to start learning Japanese. In fact, the US Department of State places Japanese in the “super-hard languages” category. You may have heard that Japanese is among the hardest languages to learn if you’re coming from an English speaking background. ![]()
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