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When you first begin to learn Japanese you are taught that Japanese has no stress and each syllable should be pronounced equally.

You also learn that certain vowels are not pronounced, or only pronounced very slightly, such as the "u" in "desu" and the "i" in "deshita".

But it seems that sometimes these vowels are pronounced if they occur in the first syllable of a word such as "sugoi", "subarashii", "shiro", "shimbun".

Is this a kind of exception to both rules or is it just something a foreigner might think they hear which is not really there?

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    "[...] Japanese has no stress and each syllable should be pronounced equally." I really hope this fallacy dies someday. The idea that Japanese has no stress sounds like a stopgap fix to prevent English-speaking students from mangling the pronunciation by forcing stress accents onto what should be high-low intonation.
    – Derek Schaab
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 14:09
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    @Derek: Japanese indeed has no stress accent in the English sense. But it does have an accent (high-low, as you've mentioned). I guess what you've really meant is that Japanese doesn't have a stress accent, but it does have stress?
    – Boaz Yaniv
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 18:37
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    @Boaz: Right, there seems to be a misconception in a lot of Japanese classes that Japanese has "no accent at all" and should be pronounced "flat". Which of course isn't what you hear if you listen to actual Japanese. The differences between stress accents and high-low accents gets glossed over all too often with these convenient untruths.
    – Derek Schaab
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 19:33
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    Linguists refer to English as having a stress accent and to Japanese as having a pitch accent. Another word they use in the case of Japanese is downstep.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 23:43
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    I didn't see it mentioned anywhere on this page, so: this phenomenon is called 'Vowel Devoicing" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Devoicing
    – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft
    Commented Aug 19, 2016 at 20:25

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I have a book in my university library that has a 100-odd page article dedicated to these mute vowels, and it still doesn't seem to give a complete picture. So unfortunately, this feature of Japanese phonology is quite complex.

Still, there's a rather simple rule of thumb that can point you to most of the places where muting may occur (and in most of them it does occur, most of the time :)). It goes like this:

  1. The vowel must be a short i or u.
  2. The consonant before the vowel must be voiceless:
    /k/, /s/ (also includes しゅ), /t/, /h/ (ふ and ひ), and maybe also /p/ (though it seems rarer).
  3. The vowel must be at the end of a word, or followed by another voiceless consonant.

This explains why you see muting in sukoshi and hikari but not in sugoi and bikkuri.

Another useful thing to remember is that you can't have two muted vowels in a row, so in words suki and tsukushita not all vowels that match rule 1-3 become mute.

Edit:

I should have given more than a passing mentions to the exceptions, because they are quite many. The rules I've given cover most of the occurrences of muted vowels, and by 'most' I don't mean 99%. It's probably not even 80%, though I'm only giving rough guesses here.

So here are some exceptions:

  • [bikkrishta] for びっくりした is quite common.
  • Sometimes (in really fast speech) some very specific grammatical forms get their vowels elided, even when the vowels are not /u/ or /i/. For instance, わからない can be shortened to [wakarnai]. It usually goes further than that with /r/ assimilating to the /n/, and thus you get the わかんない which you very often find in writing.
  • Tsuyoshi Ito and Kdanski have mentioned [sbarashii] [sgoi] in the comments.

There are of course many more. This is just an example why this issue is complex.

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    Could you provide title/author of this book?
    – liori
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 13:59
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    I realized that I sometimes mute the “u” in subarashii (seemingly depending on how loud I speak) although it breaks the rule 3. Probably my pronunciation is nonstandard.
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 14:14
  • I also have heard すばらしい and すごい with a muted す. Non-standard maybe, but probably not uncommon.
    – Kdansky
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 16:03
  • @liori: I might be wrong, but I think it's "World papers in phonetics Festschrift for Dr. Onishi Kiju". I've just took that name from my library site, because I'm almost positively sure the book that contained the article was indeed a Festschrift.
    – Boaz Yaniv
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 18:24
  • @Tsuyoshi: I don't know whether it's standard or not, but as I've said before, these rules have quite a few exceptions. That's why I call them rule of thumbs - they help you capture a great deal of the most common muted vowels.
    – Boaz Yaniv
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 18:25

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