I’ve searched the internet for Japanese pronounciation guides. While I’ve found some materials, there is still some question as to how to correctly say this word.
Your help is appreciated.
SEN-say.
The “ei” is pronounced as in the English word “weight.”
Think of it as “EH” and “EE” pronounced together very rapidly.
Gary T beat me to it! But if you’d like to know more…
There are five vowel sounds in Japanese.
a as in father
i as in…well…in
u as in chute
e as in egg
o as in frog
In words like sensei, the vowels are pronounced individually, but since the word is said quite fast, the sounds tend to run into each other. So ei tends to sound like ay, ai (the word for love) sounds like eye and so on.
Remember, Japanese is a pitch stress language, and in the case of “sensei”, the stress depends on the context in which the word is used, and can also vary by region.
Not much commentary I can make about the /s/ sounds. They are pronounced identically to each other, and I’d say they are alveolar and not dental.
As for the vowel sounds, I must humbly disagree with my learned colleagues. Japanese has a basic 5-vowel system, but all vowel sounds, including those we would describe as /u/ and /o/, are unrounded. The “e” and “ei” in “sensei” are identical in terms of the shape of the mouth and the location of the tongue. “ei” is pronounced longer, but that is all. It is not at diphthong. The exact sound does not exist in English. It is a mid-front unrounded vowel.
The effect of the “n” is that it nasalizes the preceding vowel. It does not exist as a separate consonant sound.
So, in conclusion, “sensei” consists of the following four sounds:
- [s]
- [e~] (nasalized)
- [s]
- [e:] (long)
Good point about “n”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the nasalization only occures for a stand-alone “n”-- an “n” not followed by a vowel.
Regarding the ‘n’, I think the rule is that it nasalizes the preceding vowel when it is at the end of the syllable.
This means, then, where you have an ‘n’ at the end of a syllable, and the following syllable starts with a vowel, you will get a nasal vowel followed by a non-nasal vowel. I wish I could think of an example.
LordDenning, I don’t think anyone is calling ei a dipthong. It is definitely two separate sounds, but to the non-native Japanese ear its SOUNDS like a dipthong. Which is why my father pronounces sensei to rhyme with G’day.
My Japanese, in a word, sucks. But I did go to Japanese school until I was teenager and so my pronunciation isn’t half bad. Lord Denning is right in saying that part of the difficulty it that there really isn’t an equivalent English vowel to the “e” sound in Japanese. The best I can describe my pronunciation is “SEHN-say” with the “ay” part foreshortened. I do pronounce the “n”, but it’s not a heavy “n”. It’s more like the n sound in “man” rather than “manner.”
I can’t think of an example of this either. I think it’s because of the syllable structure of Japanese. If a vowel were to follow the “n” sound, then the “n” would no longer be the preceding syllable’s coda, but would instead be the next syllable’s onset. That is, the syllables “na, ni, nu, ne, no” would be used instead (as in the word for “what”, “na-ni”).
gen’in (“source”), is one of many words containing syllabic n followed by a vowel. It sounds different from genin (“person of low status”). But sometimes there is a conversion, as in tennou (“emperor”). The kanji are individually ten and ou, but the latter becomes nou in this case. (This is actually the only example of this change I can think of.)
I don’t know about you, but to me the a in father and the o in frog are the same vowel. The Japanese o is more like the o in stone (but as LordDenning writes, unrounded). i is sometimes short, as in in, but generally it is long, as in green.
sensai…sin-SAY. literally “polished expert”
I’m tempted to ask my husband directly in order to get the Straight Dope, since everyone seems to have such different opinions!
The word being discussed in this thread, sensei, is pronounced as described by Gary T, Tsubaki, LordDenning, and chrisn. It literally means “one who has gone before” (more or less).
sensai means incompetence.
cough
Folks talking about “unrounded vowels”… Does that mean that you don’t make a circle with your lips? That would be usual in pronouncing an English “O”, but I can still make a similar (but not identical) sound with my lips forming a horizontal opening. Is that an “unrounded O”?
[sensa]tional
Maybe a more literal translation would be “born before” or (from the character order) even “before born”.
:o Oops! Yes, you’re absolutely right, Tradnor. I stand corrected. And, as LordDenning predicted, gen’in would indeed be pronounced with a nasalized vowel and no n sound. “Sensai”, however, definitely has an n sound. So, now I’m left scratching my head over the rules of Japanese pronunciation.
Tsubaki’s an Aussie, so her pronunciation chart works if you say it in an Aussie accent.
The unrounded o is made with the lips in a relaxed open position. Try saying “boat” slowly but without rounding your lips in order to hear it.
My fiancee is Japanese and I am trying to learn Japanese myself.
Sensei is pronounced “sin-say” as other dopers have noted.
In my Japanese 101 book, it is written in romanji “sensee” and in hiragana “‚¹‚ñ‚¹‚¢”. The character “‚¢” is read as “eh”.
So why do we write it “‚¹‚ñ‚¹‚¢”/sensei? According to my Japanese teacher “It just looks better.”
I’m lazy, so I’m not going to bother logging out. This is High Priestess.
Correction to ava’s post. AFAIK, as a semifluent native Japanese speaker, it is written in hiragana as ‚¹‚ñ‚¹‚¢. The last character, ‚¢, is normally read “ii” as in “bee”.
However, in certain words with double vowels (in our case, “sensee/sensei”), you swap what -would- have been the same character for an “ii”. Therefore, it is pronounced Sen-seh-Eh, but written Sen-seh-Ee.
There are exceptions, such as ‚¨‚Ë‚¦‚³‚ñ, which is read Oh-neh-eh-san (I add an “h” to stress the pronunciation, btw), but still uses an ‚¦ instead of an ‚¢. As my sensee would say, “I don’t have to explain it to you, because I can’t. Just deal with it.”
To explain why you’ll see it written as sensei in some texts:
If you’re going to write it in English characters (romaji), there are two different styles. One follows exact pronunciation (which means you would write it as “sensee”), and one follows Japanese writing (in which case you would write “sensei” but still read it as “sensee.”)
Obviously, the latter develops confusion among those who don’t know which words are originally written with a different pronunciation, so the former style is usually used in Japanese textbooks for foreigners.