Pronunciation of 部屋

Question

This is a question I had for some time: can 部屋 be pronounced as "hea", or it's always pronounced as "heya", with an audible YA sound?

I'm asking this because more often than not I hear it without the Y sound (like here in the pronunciation by akitomo, while that from molio clearly has that sound): usually I can hear it in other words, but I know some sound can be hard to hear if the listener isn't used to it (like nasalized vowels), so I'm not sure if it's an irregular (or imprecise) pronunciation, or if it's just I can't hear that specific sound in that specific word.

Answer 1

Though it is true that //eja// and //ea// tend to be neutralized in fast speech (e.g. 部屋タイプ vs ヘアタイプ), the sound clips on that forvo page all sound appropriate to me.

It is a conjecture, but since you said you are Italian, the standard Italian language has a 4-level vowel height distinction; that means you have an open //ɛ// (in vento "wind") and a closed //e// (in venti "twenty") between //i// and //a//. Japanese, in contrary, only has 3-level height, with only //e// that stands in the very middle ([[e̞]]) between //i// and //a//. It means the Japanese language tolerates a bit more open //i// than the Italian counterpart. In the sound clips I hear two distinct Japanese sounds //e// and //j// (which is nothing but //i//) after //h// and before //a//, but if you only hear monotonic //e//, you are perhaps recognizing both the starting and ending articluations within the range of Italian //e//.

(By the way strawberrybrown's pronunciation sounds most standard to me among those clips, and molio's one sounds overly exaggerated.)