6 Bad Habits That Make Your Japanese Sound Unnatural
You spend years of hard work, sweat, and tears to have good sounding Japanese. The one thing you don’t want to be told is that your Japanese is unnatural. While you my want to give yourself some friendly leeway at your earlier levels, there comes a time when you won’t accept sounding like a foreigner any more. You want to talk the talk the way Japanese talk the talk.
I often talk with foreigners who speak Japanese. Despite some of their high levels, I often hear the same simple speaking mistakes. Yeah, these are minor mistakes, which I guess you could kind of ignore. But you don’t want to join the ranks of people who have been speaking the language for decades, and still sound wrong. These small errors require a bit of fixing once they are ingrained in your Japanese, but they are fixable.
Fixing these issues are what will make the transition of Japanese people telling you:
“Your Japanese is good.”
to
“You sound Japanese.”
1. Small Tsu っ
You learn this in the very beginning when you are touching hiragana for the first time in the early weeks of your Japanese journey. You continue with っ forever. It’s that one little character that causes you to a pause a bit (Japanese grammar joke!)
Now it feels like something so small (Japanese grammar joke part 2!) and insignificant. When people talk fast, you may even think it is hardly noticeable. And if you don’t include it, it’s not that big a deal.
But it is a major big deal. Japanese do not leave out the っ. If you are Japanese or a pro, you feel the っ wherever you go. And even though you get accustomed to talking fast, the っ is not dropped.
2. The extended vowel う or ー
東京 (とうきょう)、数字(すうじ)、高校(こうこう)、エレベーター
This follows the same exact principle as the small っ. Just because you are talking faster, doesn’t mean you can leave them out. They need to be there. And speaking of talking faster . . .
3. Talking too fast
Getting better doesn’t equal talking faster. Japanese is a slow language. It sounds fast in the start. The better you get, the slower it sounds. Keep your Japanese slow. I’m especially talking to you fellow speedster Americans out there.
4. Pronounce loan words properly
Japan is filled with loan words. You must use them if you want to sound Japanese. There is no way around this. Pure Japanese doesn’t exist anymore. Japanese is an ever-evolving language. Evolve with it, or be left behind.
But more importantly, you must say loan words the Japanese way, with Japanese pronunciation. Please don’t say ビデオ like video. It’s a B sound here.
Japanese loan words appear easy to Western foreigners due to a bit of your cheating English brain. The reality is they are a huge obstacle because your brain is tied to the English pronunciation. Unlike new Japanese words, where you have no background, you already know how they originally sounded.
2 of the beginning words most people learn, yet most foreigners always say wrong are: カリフォルニア and マクドナルド. Say them out loud. Watch a video of someone saying them. Result?
5. 相槌 (The conversation flow words)
相槌 (あいづち) are the sounds and responses given to make a conversation flow, and to show you are listening as well as your reaction. In English, these are words like ohh, uh-huh, yea?, I see.
Foreigners seem to be terrible at this. There are two levels to this.
Response Words:
You probably know these and use them. But the timing is critical, and a place where most learners take a lot of time to get used to.
- はい、ええ、うん, ああ (yes)
- そうですね (that’s how it is, I think)
- そうですか (is that so?)
It took me an incredibly long time to get the hang of はい – timing (which is also like the first word you learn in the language). I’m sure there could be a book written on はい, like the はいの和 (The harmony of hai). If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you haven’t had enough Japanese conversations yet.
Response Sounds
へえぇ~
ほぉぅ~
はぁ~
ふぅん~
These are the core of the Japanese language. If you listen to real conversations, they dominate them.
And any subject that covers these response sounds requires a viewing of these slightly old, but humorous videos covering the subject. A must see if you haven’t already.
How to speak fluent Japanese without saying a word Part 1 and 2
6. 擬声語 (ぎせいご) – 擬態語 (ぎたいご) – 擬音語(ぎおんご) or Onomatopoeia/Japanese sound symbolism
These are the words that represent the sounds of living things, non-living things, feelings, emotions, situations, everything. Sometimes it feels like in Japan, every thing and action in this world has a sound-word to go with it. Again, this is a topic that a graduate student could fully write up a nice 100 page dissertation on. So the above is just a generalization.
Natural sounding Japanese is filled to the brim with these words. And as foreigners, we kind of feel like we don’t really need them, considering we can express these words in different, normal ways.
Want a book that has a bunch? Try this. 6500 natural words for you.
Let’s Get Natural!
Fix these issues. Really. This isn’t one of those maybe I’ll learn later if I have time. This is something that you should consciously keep in the back of your mind. Luckily immersion does a nice trick for you. The more you listen to natural Japanese, the more you have a tendency to mimic it.
I want you to sound great. I want every person that walks away from this site to be mistaken for having been raised in Japan.
Are you guilty of any of the above? Any other common mistakes you notice that most foreigners seem to make that keeps their Japanese sounding foreign?
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
I agree with all the above.
The first video for me is actually an example of someone sounding unnatural. When a foreigner, no matter how good he is, is overly-enthusiastic, and overly-mimetic of Jpn characteristics, it feels like they’ve cover up their real personality and thus they sound unnatural. All I see when I talk to them is the exaggeration and I can’t even hear the person. It’s like when I interviewed this one lady who had gum in her mouth the entire interview. On her resume, she was what we needed, but I didn’t hear a single word come out of her mouth because she was a) chewing gum which I hate to begin with and b) chewing gum DURING an interview.
So, people who lose their personality trying too hard to imitate “Japanese people” is a sign of unnatural Japanese, no matter how fluent they are.
I feel like this is true, to an extent. There are definitely those out there that force exaggeration when speaking in Japanese as a foreign language. Probably because their fascination with the language and desire to mimic what they feel they’ve heard and sounds cool or cute. However, there are case studies that say that for bilingual speakers (since you are one yourself, maybe you have some input) their personality changes when they switch languages. For instance, being more blunt in one language verses the other. I don’t think it’s an actual personality change, as the person is the same person, but just the way the language or culture of that language works.
You kind of know when an English speaker has really become accustomed to the language by the way their personality is represented. There’s a bit more honesty and directness in their speech. Even if they still make grammatical errors or struggle with expression, something seems more fluent about this kind of language than people who have mastered grammar but struggle with the norms of the culture that would affect the way they use the language.
There’s going to be someone in the Japanese society that has a similar personality to you, so a good idea would be to observe how they use the language and mimic. There are a variety of personalities in every culture. “The Japanese personality” doesn’t exist. There are norms, but even those differ between regions.
I really think someone has to let go of their culture to an extent as well when dealing with another culture. I don’t think you should just change yourself because you want to be Japanese (though, change may happen as you learn about new and different perspectives), but at the same time I’ve seen people so stubborn and who have complained about so many different facets of Japanese culture, it makes me wonder, why are they even learning Japanese? When you enter into a new culture, your language and personality are going to change because it’s a new influence. Maybe this applies more when you’re younger and less ingrained. But I think it’s natural. I don’t think it’s a sign of unnatural Japanese, but rather a sign that you’ve been influenced by Japan.
I think because I am a native speaker of two other cultures (three even), I’m less susceptible to trying to imitate an exaggerated form of the culture because I’ve already learned how to maintain my personality amongst my several languages. Now, my styling will change in terms of being more humble in Japanese, more vocal in French, more direct in English, and more “friendly” in Spanish but my personality does not change within the four. And maybe that’s the real factor: styling vs personality. And this takes into consideration that enthusiasm does not equal personality.
So, very interesting to think about.
Ah! I agree! It’s styling, not changing one’s personality.
The videos made by ken tanaka are meant to be comedy, so I don’t think that’s how he really acts when he is speaking Japanese (though I could be wrong!)
The lines between between personality, character, and style kind of blur a bit when you speak another language due to outside factors like ways to express yourself in the language and cultural norms. It is definitely a bit of a deep topic and I think it effects people in different ways.
I think that the way you made point 1 has horribly, horribly structured. First I read that I’m probably making bad habits. Then I see the subjects of the っ, and then I read about its insignificance and about how it is the “Japanese grammar joke”.
Guess what impression this leaves? My forward-thinking brain came to about the following conclusion: “Wait? The っ is a joke? It’s not actually pronounced?! This changes everything!”
Then I tried to process the shock of the っ not being pronounced. (It was quite shocking!)
And then I read on and saw that the point you were making was that the っ actually WAS pronounced. My reaction was like “Are you kidding me? >_>”
The way you structured this made it come over the same way as if you were to write an article on something, and then at the end wrote “Just kidding! Forget anything I said!”
This article actually made me try to remember that the っ was not pronounced in practice, rather than reinforce that I have to pronounce it. I had always the っ as being equally significant as any other Kana character. After having processed the shock of that not being the case, it’s quite difficult to go back to blindly believing that.
I’m quite annoyed by this; I’m currently immersing myself in Japanese trying to forget that this ever happened. Please restructure that point so others don’t walk into the same trap.
He wasn’t saying anything about the grammar point itself being a joke, the wording he used to present the idea contained jokes.
one little character (small tsu)
something so small (small tsu)
Yes, 2 bad puns on the slight “pause” it creates in a word and the fact that it’s a “small” っ. There is no insult towards the grammar itself as this whole post is showing how important it is.
Idk, when I read it and it said stuff like “it FEELS insignificant, FEELS like it’S fine to drop it” etc, I thought it was pretty obviously heading towards saying that it actually IS significant. You should finish reading a point before assuming stuff in the future, it would save you some trouble and annoyance :P
He wasn’t say “っ” is a joke, he was just specifying that he was making a joke about Japanese grammar. 落ち着いてくださいよ、もう。
I haven’t actually spoken any Japanese yet (except to myself, which is somewhat creepy now that I think about it haha), but trying to sound natural is something that I think quite a bit about. In my personal experience with learning English as a non-native speaker the biggest obstacle to sounding natural has been the accent. I think a big part of this problem is that when I started learning English in middle school the teacher we had was not a native speaker, so when I started speaking I picked up the teacher’s non-native accent. In some ways it doesn’t matter if you have a bit of an accent, as long as you are clearly understood, but if you’re aiming for a true native level in a language you need to have a native accent. I was working as a counselor at a summer camp in California a couple of years ago, and one of the first things people always asked me was “so what country are you from?”, which didn’t feel that great after a while because I suppose at some level everyone wants to fit in and not be seen as “different”.
So I’m curious about the accent issue with some of you who have reached a high level in Japanese. For instance, if you speak with a stranger on the phone can they tell that you are not a native speaker based on your accent alone?
In response to the second sentence of point 3: Japanese is actually an incredibly fast language. Read about this study done a few years ago: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html
Interesting article but they are ranking it based on information density, how many syllables it takes to say something. They ranked Japanese low, meaning it takes a lot more to say the same thing, thus requires faster speed.
I’m guessing the text translated in all languages was a more formal text. Because in spoken conversational japanese, often times 20-30% unnecessary speech is dropped out. I’m assuming this wasn’t factored in. In reality this would mean incredibly high density for less syllables due to the lack of necessity to use a lot of grammar.
I think this skews the results.
In addition, I’m also highly skeptical at the accuracy of taking a sample of only 59 speakers for 7 different languages. It doesn’t say how many Japanese were involved, but let’s assume it was divide almost evenly and there were 8. Were they male or female? Old or young? Highly educated or not? From Tokyo or Osaka or the countryside? Lived abroad for many years or only lived in Japan?
There are way too many variables that effect speaking speed to consider 8 people representative of the Japanese language.
But in addition to ranking for information density (which is actually a separate issue from the point I wanted to raise), they also calculated the number of syllables spoken per second, and Japanese had the most syllables spoken per second.
I agree that the small sample size is less than desirable, but I think the other factors you mentioned help support the legitimacy of the study. I think that precisely *because* there are so many variables that affect speaking speed, not controlling for them would give a better representation of the variety that exists within the Japanese language – and thus the Japanese language as a whole. In reality there is no such thing as 標準語.
The point still remains though that they were reading from a text. And spoken Japanese, with all it’s omissions is significantly different than written Japanese. There will be a lot more syllables when they are reading a text out loud then if it was normal speaking.
And I can’t agree that taking a random tiny sample is accurate, regardless of variables. Studies like this are accurate because they use large samples (larger samples account for variables).
But anyway, the speed is just my observation based on a lot of interactions with Japanese, and the way foreigners speak Japanese too fast (causing Japanese people to complain they need to slow down.)
I don’t know. Japanese seems like the fastest language in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFJfrrSJWlg (チーム早口)
Thanks for that link! So funny! And yet, still could understand it. イエース!!!^o^v
Hahaha, great video! Imagine living in a world like that.
To go with what Adshap is saying, here’s a video of a guy showing how many syllables we can cut off in English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8k1O8KwGXA
Now, I don’t speak that way as I tend to enjoy the art of articulation, but there are definitely many who do. The question is, is the shortened version really faster?
I read both this site’s article on speaking too fast and the study mentioned here, and obviously started to wonder – is Japanese actually slower or faster than, say, English?
One of the questions I would like to ask about the study, though, is what exactly do they mean by the word “syllable”.
European languages are syllable-based, but Japanese is mora-based. The timing of the Japanese and Western European languages is entirely different.
If every mora is counted as a syllable, then I think there would certainly be more of them per second than English syllables, but that would not necessarily make the language “faster”. In fact I think speed between differently-timed languages cannot really be measured by any mechanical standard.
To give an example, こうなったら could be called four syllables, but it is six morae. Kou is certainly a longer-timed sound than the English one-syllabel word “if” but no longer, perhaps shorter, depending on the speaker, than the one-syllable word “horse”
However if you start to count syllables in Japanese as if it were a West European language you would have to make a lot of arbitrary decisions, so I suspect morae were counted as syllables for the purpose of this study.
But morae are not actually syllables in the West European sense and there are certainly going to be more of them per minute than there are syllables. This really says nothing about the “speed” of the language.
And then comes Kansai-ben to throw everyone off with irregular long vowels…
I also notice almost all of these errors with foreigners speaking Japanese. I’m constantly confused by the destruction of rhythm caused by failure to use っ or the incorrect elongation/contraction of sounds in veteran students of the language.
I think the problem with foreigners speaking Japanese quickly comes in this rhythm as well. Speaking quickly is possible but it’s too easy for many foreigners to break the rhythm of the language and sound awkward while doing so. I would certainly agree that Japanese would have a hard time matching up to the speed of American English, though.