Wednesday, February 20, 2008

English pronunciations

Needless to say, Japanese is not good at speaking English.
Generally speaking, there are two reasons. Firstly, English education in Japan focuses on reading and grammar. Secondly, Japanese pronunciation is very simple and quite different from that of English.

Today, I exercised English pronunciation, and I’ve got interested in those of “dn” and “tn”, “tl” and “dl”. “dn” is included in “garden”, “tn” is in “cotton”. “tl” is in “kettle”, and “dl” is in “candle”.

They are very difficult for me, but the sounds are very interesting, because usually Japanese pronunciation are constituted by single vowel, or a combination of a vowel and some consonants, such as “ka”, “wa”, “” and “i”, so I am not familiar with double consonants in Japanese contexts and they sound very “English-like” for me.

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