rain, candy, tomorrow!
August 19th, 2005 by heather雨 = あめ sounds like Ame; rain
飴 = あめ; ame; candy
明日 = みょうにち; tomorrow
i met with my japanese tutor for coffee, and talked about ideas on how to make the sessions most useful. we have loads in common, not least of which is mixing cocktails.
we talked about the problem with hiragana, because sometimes you won’t know the meaning unless it is in context- because you won’t know how to pronounce it. for example:
rain is 雨. the hiragana is あめ. but you have to say it with a stress on the A.
if you say it with a stress on the ME, then you get candy instead!
candy is 飴 (あめ, ame)
明日は雨になるかな？
lit: tomorrow rain will be?
eng: will it rain tomorrow?
明日 = みょうにち (tomorrow)
i don’t know how to pronounce these kanji on their own at the moment, but i know from my meagre chinese that the first character means bright, and the second means sunshine or day.
so in this sentence with the word rain in it, she said you probably won’t be misunderstood if you pronounce it wrong. (no one is going to think you’re asking, “tomorrow will it candy?”)
context and stress is important with all these homophones!
August 23rd, 2005 at 4:06 am
Hi there,
I really like your blog. I almost forgot some rules like putting a stress on the ME for AME（飴）. People clearly understand its meaning even without a stress on the ME, especially when the word is used in context.
As to how to pronounce each kanji:
明 ＝ めい
日 ＝ ひ
Hope this helps!
August 23rd, 2005 at 12:32 pm
thanks for stopping by. i’m enjoying your site too.
ah, i really do need a dictionary for sure now. i tried taking the character: 明, and on my mac doing ‘reverse conversion’… but it gives me:
あきら
but that’s quite different from めい!
August 23rd, 2005 at 2:22 pm
One of the toughest things about learning Japanese is to memorize Chinese charasters, most of which have two or more different pronunciations.
明 ＝ １） 明白（めい・はく）； ２） 明日（あ・す、or みょう・にち）
３） 明らか （あき・らか） ４） 明 （あきら） often as a person’s name
It’s nice to have an electronic dictionary. I have one by Seiko, and it’s pretty good. Expensive, though.
August 23rd, 2005 at 4:56 pm
I read somewhere that, in English, the rhythm of speech is more important to understanding than other details of pronunciation. A foreign speaker of English who gets the rhythm right is more easily understood than one whose English is more correct in other ways but whose rhythm is wrong.
In English dictionaries, there is usually a mark to show the syllable that’s stressed, but I haven’t come across such marks in Japanese dictionaries. Is that because the stresses are so natural that the Japanese take them for granted, or that they’re not standard across different dialects, or that it’s thought to be one subtelty too many for a foreigh student? Or, is it just me buying cheap dictionaries?
There’s a whole section on the subject in Haruhiko Kindaichi’s ‘The Japanese Language’. He refers to this as ‘pitch accent’ (in contrast to ’stress accent’), meaning that the relative pitch of syllables within a word is fixed. Japanese has two pitches, high and low. Each syllable is either high or low: pitch does not change within a syllable (in contrast to Chinese, for example).
Kindaichi goes on to say that there are a limited number of different arrangements of pitch within words. The Tokyo dialect has only 4 types of tone patterns in 4-syllable words: KAmakiri (a mantis); aSAgao (a morning glory); kaRAKAsa (an umbrella); moNOSASHI (a foot rule). The limited number of pitch patterns results in words that can’t be differentiated even by tone.
Anyway, all that being the case, how are we beginners supposed to get pronunciation right from the beginning if pitch accents aren’t made clear in our study materials?
August 24th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Wikipedia has an article on pitch-accent in Japanese, which gives a different angle to the one I quoted above:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
Hmm.
August 25th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
good links. pitch accent is definitely over my head- but i can’t quite help wondering about it…
i also found in this wikibook, they were discussing ways to indicate pitch accent:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Japanese:Discussion#Pitch_Accent
there’s no standard? there must be… hm…
also of interest, this mark-up for furigana: ruby annotation. it places furigana over kanji automagically. but only support by IE on windows. go figure. it’s good for something.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Japanese:Discussion#Furigana_with_ruby_notation
a fellow in the wikibooks site also made a script to make ruby annotation easier.
i’m going to put that on my ‘to do when advanced’ list.
September 2nd, 2005 at 5:21 am
hmm, I just found this looking for the japanese word for “day after tomorrow” (I think it’s asatte). Just wanted to add that 明日 is usually pronounced as ashita or asu.
I learn most of my kanji pronounciations from seeing them manga or song lyrics and memorizing them. Memorizing them seems to be the only way to learn all of the uses of kanji, and using them in context works best for me.
Anywho, just 2 cents from a stranger.
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:19 am
Everything Lance said about 明日 is correct. I just wanted to add a bit.
“myounichi” is a correct but very formal reading of 明日. You won’t hear “myounichi” in normal speech.
The pronunciations “asu” and “ashita” can’t be arrived at by combining the pronunciations of the individual characters. These pronunciations are specific to the combination 明日.
Re: pitch accent
Be aware of it. Imitate native speakers as best you can. Don’t insist too much on the supposed “rules.” And relax. Pitch accent will only rarely cause you to be misunderstood.