alexandrec

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	470 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
211 badges		location	Canada		seen	Apr 3 at 12:50

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Feb 22	comment	How does pitch accent work in Japanese? Except that nobody acquires it automatically. If you care about how you speak the language, it's worth learning, and it's worth the effort. I'm surprised at how easily people dismiss it as useless, simply because it's difficult. I think that if you work as a English teacher, for instance (and this is common enough in Japan), to be able to demonstrate that you can do a decent job of Japanese is an effective way to gain credibility.
Feb 15	answered	Why do English sources for learning Japanese leave out pitch?
Feb 15	revised	How does pitch accent work in Japanese? added 358 characters in body
Feb 15	answered	How are し, ち, and じ pronounced differently than in English?
Feb 15	answered	How does pitch accent work in Japanese?
Nov 21	comment	Insertion of “y” sound between vowels Accurate answer, but it could be made easier to understand. I think the problem simply comes from the fact that an English speaker would expect to find a glottal stop before a word starting with e and o (which, phonetically, is not wo, but o), but since there is no glottal stop in Japanese, and since particles effectively form part of the word they are attached to, this run-in of sounds confused him.
Nov 20	comment	Is accent position predictable for -i verbs in Osaka/Kansai? Many thanks for the detailed answer and the references.
Nov 19	awarded	Nice Answer
Nov 15	comment	Is accent position predictable for -i verbs in Osaka/Kansai? "Are accent positions predictable in Kansaiben" would be a MUCH wider -- and complex -- question, whereas the OP is asking about -i adjectives only.
Nov 9	awarded	Investor
Nov 8	comment	Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing “L”? You are right, l is sometimes written but not pronounced, however l and r and never spelled one way and pronounced the other. In that sense, I meant that they aren't misleading.
Nov 7	comment	Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing “L”? Japanese /r/ can surface as either [l] or [r], but these are not English r or l, if that's what you mean. There are several kinds of l's and r's across languages.
Nov 7	comment	Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing “L”? [l] and [r] are free variation allophones in Japanese -- allophones needn't be in complementary distribution. The fact that /r/ can surface as [l] in slower speech (and more so in certain positions) IS proof that it's an allophone; [r] is undefined for laterality. As for my comment about using katakana, it was poorly worded: I meant that using katakana for words of English origin makes learning them as English words more difficult, and use of katakana when learning English does learners a disservice. English spelling can indeed be misleading, but not when it comes to l and r.
Nov 6	comment	Is accent position predictable for -i verbs in Osaka/Kansai? From what I know about Standard Japanese (one of the pages linked to in the Wikipedia article is mine), this is what I would deduct -- but I know very little about Kansaiben, so my assumptions could be wrong. It appears here that the -i adjective ending is a -3 morpheme -- when you add it, it assigns pitch accent to the antepenultimate mora. The two examples you list (oishii and shindoi) do not fit the pattern presumably because they underlyingly already have their own pitch which supercedes the -i morpheme. One option would be to see if changing the ending to -katta confirms this.
Nov 6	awarded	Excavator
Nov 6	revised	What differences should I look out for between male vs female speech? I changed "pronunciation" to "speech" as this appears to be the intent of your question.
Nov 6	revised	Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing “L”? Tried to improve question title.
Nov 6	comment	Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing “L”? @snailplane, I tried changing the title. How's that?
Nov 6	suggested	suggested edit on Why do Japanese speakers have difficulty pronouncing “L”?
Nov 6	comment	Why is “Xy” pronounced as “Ki Shi” in Xylitol「キシリトール」? The origin of the word is not a direct indication of its pronunciation -- scientific words are regularly created out of Latin and it's a dead language. In the case of xylitol, though the word may be Greek in composition, it is almost certainly not the case that the word actually came to Japanese (or any other language) from Greece per se.