It’s always instructive to look at the hiragana to see what sounds exist in the Japanese language. Note that there is no “l” line (ie, no "la, li, lu, le, lo); that in the “h” line there is a “fu” and not a “hu”; there is a “b” line but no “v” line; the “s” line has a “shi” but no “si”; and there is no “th” line. If you want to now how a Japanese person is going to try and pronounce an English word, just try writing that word in Romanized hiragana, and that will give you a very good idea (although it’s not perfect). For example: John = Jion (Ji- o- n).
How long ago were you a teacher there? I find this to no longer be the case at all. The textbooks I used in public junior high schools had no katakana in them at all, and the current curriculum attempts to emphasize oral skills. Granted, this is hampered by the facts that older English teachers do not have adequate oral skills and Japanese students do not like to speak up in any class, but at least so far as writing goes I can’t think of a time when katakana is used in the classroom.
This is not so much Canadian as unAmerican. And it’s more “d’yew-ring” than “juring”. I’ve never seen it spelt with a J though.
In general Americans pronounce a U following a D in the German way, ooo, so for instance “due” as “doo”, where other native english speakers say "d’yew’.
Linguistically speaking “r” and “l” are both “liquids”. They happen in the middle of the mouth, not up against the teeth or the lips. They’re very closely related. So some cultures don’t make a distinction between the two. Just like English doesn’t make a distinction between…well of course I can’t come up with a good example, but we do the same thing.
(Sorry if this has been covered, I usually read the whole thread but I’m exhausted.)
Speak for yourself. I can and do pronounce them differently when speaking formally.
In English we make a distinction in pronunciation for voiceless stops depending on their place in the syllable. If they occur in the initial position, we aspirate them. If they’re in another position, we don’t. Now, some languages make a distinction between aspirated voiceless stops and unaspirated voiceless stops. Native English speakers who attempt to say the unaspirate voiceless stops in initial positions in Korean or Vietnamese will often aspirate them and thus speak a different word than the one they intended.
Walloon,
Try this experiment:
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To to www.praat.org and download the Praat Program. Install it on your computer.
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Now, record the following (be sure to say it three times–nothing magical, that just so the middle one will be the most natural):
“I saw the latter kitten crawling on the ladder.”
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Choose Edit from the main menu. Then carefully select where the double t is and compare it the double d.
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Visually examine the display graph.
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Have the Praat program play just the double t and just the double d.
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Let us know if your perception of your speech really was accurate. (It could be, but then you’d be a very rare native speaker of English if you really do pronounce the middle sound in those words as you say.)
I think “when speaking formally” is the critical part of this sentence (and also why I’m still stumped at a British English example that isn’t obviously a dialect. The “proper” English is just too damned proper! Not being a student of English dialects, and not knowing which English dialect the OP speaks, I have no hope of finding interchangable phenomes for him.)
We all enunciate (make more distict phenomes) when we’re speaking formally. But it takes a lot of work, and is not what we do when we’re just speaking to one another.
Also, just because you personally may make a distinction between /d/ and /t/, doesn’t mean that everyone does, or that you wouldn’t understand the speech if someone asked you to pass the “budder” or hold the “latter” in place until they came back “lader”. The sounds of /d/ and /t/ in the middle of a word are automatically understood to be the same when you hear them in nearly every dialect of English, even if your dialect or your speaking situation has them pronounced a bit differently.
I really noticed the “l” and “n” blur in Cantonese. I mean, is it “li ho” or “ni ho”? (In Mandarin, it seems to be accepted as “Ni hao”).
It works in reverse, too, for Westerners: I had all sorts of trouble knowing where to place my tongue in pronouncing “xi” and “qi” during my short stint in learning Mandarin. Also, in Japanese its not so much “ra ri ru re ro”, as “lra lri lru lre lro” - placing your tongue behind your front teeth when forming the sound, and a trap in early Japanese lessons.
A lot of people think they do, but don’t. People’s own evaluation of their speaking style tends to be unreliable. If you actually did, you would sound very odd and affected.
Ya, that’s how I sound sometimes.
I was there last year. Full-force katakana everywhere you look. The textbooks were relatively (though not completely) free of katakana, but the effect was completely negated as the students would make a katakana cheat-sheet to accompany the book, unhindered by the teachers. They study English as a subject, not as a skill. Maybe some of the higher-level schools have advanced somewhat, but from what I saw, graduates of the Japanese public school system have virtually no hope of speaking or writing anything that resembles correct English. On the one hand, this isn’t so bad because 99.9% of them will never have any need for English, but on the other hand, that’s 12 years that could have been used for something else.