Tham khảo tài liệu 'japanese beyond words how to walk and talk like a native speaker phần 3', ngoại ngữ, nhật - pháp - hoa- others phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 66 JAPANESE BEYOND WORDS Vowel length can be shown either with macrons or in the manner below SHORT VOWELS LONG VOWELS a tot aa father i sit ii sheet u put uu root e pet ee hay o dodo oo coat but pronounced with more tension and higher in the mouth Purists will argue that these English examples only approximate the sounds of Japanese vowels. That of course is good reason for students to trust their ears not their eyes when studying any foreign language. Being unaware of the sounds of one s own language or confusing sounds with their incorrect orthographic representations is not a uniquely Japanese trait. In Portuguese the unstressed final 0 is pronounced much like an u. Thus fado the song genre made famous by Amalia Rodrigues is pronounced fadu. Many native speakers however insist that they hear an 0 at the end of that word. In Italian as well there are two 0 sounds in most dialects. But because there is only one letter that represents the two OS native speakers of Italian will invariably insist that there is only one 0 in their language. In the case of Japanese one reason native speakers are unaware of the five pairs of vowels in their language might just be the capriciousness of the Japanese writing system which uses an i to lengthen the vowel e and more often than not an u to lengthen the 0 sound. The result of that last inconsistency is that when Japanese native speakers wish to indicate to foreign students that they should lengthen their OS they will often sound out the written symbols of a word such as ko-u-ko-u high school instead of pronouncing the sounds correctly as ko o ko-o. Strange as it may seem even in romanized Japanese the long and short vowels are poorly represented. On highway signs for example AN INTERRUPTED FLOW OF AIR 67 Tokyo which has two long os is written the same way as Kyoto in which the first 0 is long but the second is short . On the other hand I liroo a district in Tokyo is always written with two OS to indicate that the last syUable
