Nihomophones: Same But Different
Japanese contains fewer phonemes than almost any other major language. For native English speakers, this makes the pronunciation of the basic sounds relatively straightforward (and, conversely, pronunciation of most foreign languages relatively nightmarish for native Japanese). As there are many short words, this also means that there are necessarily a lot of homophones. A commonly cited example would be あめ, either ‘rain’ or ‘candy’, with … Continue reading →