The End
That brings our total to 124 sounds!
🎉 🎉 🎉
I know I said “Finally” before the last section, but there’s one more small, but advanced, topic I want to mention.
For characters that end in an い sound or う sound, when they come before an UNVOICED consonant, you may sometimes hear the vowel sound い and う in those characters become "devoiced". That means you can't hear the vowels in the character. The う vowel sound is also sometimes devoiced at the END of words. For example, the common word です, is usually pronounced Des.
If you DON’T devoice these characters when they usually ARE devoiced, you will be completely understandable, so it’s not a huge issue. In fact, some natives DON’T devoice often, depending on where they’re from or their speech habits. Also, sometimes in very POLITE speech, normally devoiced mora are NOT devoiced. For example, です (Des) often becomes です (Desu) in very polite speech.
By the way, when you DO devoice one of these vowel sounds, the character as a whole should STILL be given a full MORA. For example, the く in 学生 is usually devoiced. But it still has a full MORA.
If this doesn’t make much sense to you just yet, that’s okay. It’s quite advanced, and you can worry about it more much later in your journey!
Finally:
There are few are stylistic sounds that only really appear in manga sound effects which are written in the space written around characters, like あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛, none of which are really used in words or in SPOKEN Japanese. I've never met a Japanese person who actually knows what these characters are supposed to SOUND like. They're more for adding a certain "feeling" to a scene.
Other than that, we’ve now covered all the phonetic sounds in Japanese and how to read them!
Thanks for hanging out with us for so long!
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