That’s a voiced one; you can also find an unvoiced one in the Japanese “f” as in Fuji, which is not actually an “f” but a phi.
Rusty MA in linguistics (Edinburgh, 1985) checking in here. On balance, glad I did it… it’s made life interesting.
Can manage to rub along in a few languages, too… my pronunciation in French and German really improved once I’d learned some phonetics and could figure out exactly what sounds I was meant to be making…
Of the armchair variety. Formerly big fan of William Saffire’s column in the NYT Sunday Magazine (because I had access to it and didn’t have to pay for it). BA in Spanish in 1983, I just took an oral proficiency exam with hopes of teaching Spanish in NJ public schools.
Yeah, I’ve heard the Japanese fu described as not an /f/ as we know it, but more like the puff you make to blow out a candle. It’s actually an allophone of the [h] phoneme: when it comes before u it changes into the bilabial f (more accurately, Greek letter phi) sound. But it’s still written with the* kana* for h. The Japanese u is different too: pronounced with unrounded lips, it’s a high back vowel like the Russian y (Cyrillic bI) or Turkish no-dot i. So neither the f nor the u in Romaji spelling gives you a good idea of these two sounds that don’t exist in English.
Ooooo! Turned m! That was just on my phx exam! Sweet!
Yeah, matt, “turned m” (i.e., an m printed upside-down) is the high back unrounded vowel that is Japanese “u”.
The Russian bI and the Turkish no-dot are not exactly the same sound, but they’re close. This is the “barred i”, a high-mid unrounded vowel. It’s further front than “turned m” but further back than the familiar front [i}.
The “turned m” vowel also shows up as an allophone of [u} in Tamil. The [u} is /u/ when initial and medial, but becomes /turned m/ when final.