I don’t speak a lot of Japanese these days, mainly English in class and at home, but when I do speak it, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Lately I have been shortening some important sounds in the interest of smoother speech. Here’s an example:<\/p>\n
To say “It’s cold, isn’t it?” in Japanese, you would say “\u00e5\u00af\u2019\u00e3\u0081\u201e\u00e3\u0081\u00a7\u00e3\u0081\u2122\u00e3\u0081\u00ad\u00e3\u20ac\u201a” (Samui desu ne.)<\/p>\n
But recently, I have been trimming off the “de” from “desu” like this:<\/p>\n
“Samui ssune.” <\/p>\n
Probably the “de” sound is a little out of position for my tongue, and so seeing a chance to be lazy I have been lowering the sound of “de” until it is almost inaudible, and then hissing a little to combine the “su” and the “ne”. <\/p>\n
Actually, it sounds very authentic, and I hear it often on TV and in other places in Japan. Unfortunately, it is almost exclusively a characteristic of older male speech. <\/p>\n
That’s right – solid linguistic proof that I’m getting old. <\/p>\n
I need to work on cleaning up this bad habit now. I wonder what other bad habits I’ve picked up over the years that I’m not aware of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t speak a lot of Japanese these days, mainly English in class and at home, but when I do speak it, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Lately I have been shortening some important sounds in the interest of smoother speech. Here’s an example: To say “It’s cold, isn’t it?” in Japanese, you would say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-qQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}