掲示板 Forums - HIRUGOHAN vs KIRUGOHAN
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Top > 日本語を勉強しましょう / Let's study Japanese! > Anything About Japanese
The hiragana says HIRUGOHAN, but the audio says KIRUGOHAN
I did some investigations but haven't found the latter variant on the web
For me, the audio says HIRUGOHAN. However, when it comes to listening it is very easy for the mind to play tricks on you (especially on similar sounding or rhyming sounds). If you start to think it sounds like one sound, that's the sound your ears will hear.
Try thinking HIRUGOHAN and play it over and over, and there is a good chance it will start to sound like HIRUGOHAN to you.
Are you referring to the first one? I'm talking about the latter, no matter how hard I try I swear it's KI !
Both sound like HIRUGOHAN to me. But again, you hear what you think. So, if if I think KI, I hear KI, but if I don't, I just hear HI.
Are you reallysure? i tri3d turning my volume up a lot but the difference between HI and KI is very noticeable
I think im going crazy
The Japanese H sound in ひ is not the same H sound as in English. The H you're expecting to hear is glottal (pronounced at the back of the throat), but the sound you're hearing is either velar or palatal (pronounced father forward on the roof of the mouth). K is also a velar consonant, so if you're not used to hearing ひ, your brain could be confusing it with a closer sound (the same way that native Japanese speakers have difficulty distinguishing L & R, or non-Canadians hear our "about" as "aboot").
The solution to this is just practice, and as much as possible stopping yourself from leaning on English letters to describe Japanese sounds. It might also help to do some pair drills between ひ & き specifically, so you can train yourself to differentiate better between those two sounds.
What @gillianfaith says is all true, but somewhat irrelevant, since we talking about hearing the difference, not making it. It’s about what is happening in your ear more than in your mouth. And the two sounds are incredibly similar: if you can find a spectrogram comparison somewhere out there on the net, you’ll be amazed.
Actually, I don't think this is too much of an audio trick to my ears, the HI I thought was KI was actually just a "rougher" version (or version with more hold at the beginning) of the softer HI in the first definition's audio. In other words what I thought was K was probably just a slightly different way of pronouncing H.