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The Sound System
Japanese has 16 phonetic units (phonemes), and most of these units consist of both a consonant and a vowel. The inventory of vowels is relatively small. Compare this to English, which has with 24 consonants and 15 vowels and to !Xhao, an African language, which has 156 consonants and 28 vowels. The Japanese vowel quality is variously described as "pure" or "like Italian." Japanese vowels are not diphthongized. The high back vowel /u/ is pronounced without rounding, so it sounds very different from the closest English rounded vowel (boot). Japanese has many consonants like English but the way they are pronounced can be different. For instance, a voiced velar stop (/g/) can be nasalized when it appears medially (compare the nasalized /g/ in ongaku 'music' and a non-nasal /g/ in gakkoo 'school'). The liquid /r/ is a tap in Japanese (e.g. karai 'spicy'), very different from the English /r/ in Paris; it is more like the Spanish /r/ in pero 'but'. There is also a moraic /n/, as in the word anshin ('peace of mind'). This consonant takes up one rhythmic unit. One consonant, written as /Q/ in phonemics, denotes a moraic absence of sound (also called more loosely a "double consonant"). Katta 'won' and kata 'shoulder' are different in that the former contains a double consonant and is therefore three moras long, while the latter lacks the double consonant is therefore only two moras long. Just like long and short consonants make a difference in meaning, long and short vowels also make meaning distinctions, and if a speaker neglects to make this distinction, miscommunication will result (compare obaasan 'grandmother, old woman' and obasan 'aunt, middle-aged woman').
Accent, Intonation, and Rhythm
Many learners of Japanese, when they hear Japanese spoken, think that it has an even, rhythmic, and staccato pattern. When Japanese is spoken, the length of each mora is about the same; it takes as much time to say one mora as it does to say any other mora. This gives the impression of a staccato rhythmic pace. For speakers of English, making long vowels long enough (e.g., Ōoka-san 'Ms Oooka' with three moras of /o/; or hōō 'phoenix', which has four moras; see above discussion of long vowels) and giving sufficient time to moraic silence (/Q/) (e. g., kattyatta tte 'I heard he has bought it', which has seven moras; see above; /Q/ is spelled with a double consonant) requires practice. Though placing so much importance on mora counting may appear strange, difficult, and/or unnecessary to the non-native learner, being sensitive to the number of mora within a word or phrase is of vital importance to the native speaker. For centuries in many poetic and prose literary genres (e.g., tanka and haiku), combinations of five and seven mora phrases provide the underlying rhythmic structure. And even young children in Japan know how many moras there are in a phrase.
Other trouble spots include differentiating word pairs like kani 'crab' and kagi 'key' (if the /g/ is nasalized); tan'i 'unit' and tani 'valley' (the first is a three mora word, second two moras); tsuki 'moon' and suki 'liking' (initial /ts/ for many English speakers is difficult to make and it sounds like /s/); danko 'resolutely' and ranko 'loud calling' (/d/ and /r/ in Japanese can sound alike). Japanese is not considered to be a pure tonal language, but a placement of high or low pitch can make a difference in meaning. For example (the high pitched mora is written in capitals):
HAna 'Hana', a personal name
haNA 'flower'
hana 'nose' (In actuality this word is pronounced haNA but its underlying form is unaccented hana)
One can easily see how confusing it would be if a speaker did not use the right pitch.
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