Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
This is very nearly correct. See my post and duo797's earlier, discussing what it really does. A decent approximation for beginners is that it means "double the next consonant." That's not entirely correct, and once you've started reading intermediate-level dialog, you'll see things like
あっオマエだ！ Which is "A-- omae da!" not "Aoomae da" or something.
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Excellent comment, KyleGoetz.
As a native speaker of Japanese who also happens to speak decent English, I have a big issue with the use of the term "
double consonants" with regards to the っ for the following reasons.
1. It can mislead the beginning Japanese student to fall into thinking that the same sound exists in English as double consonants do exist in English as well. The truth is the っ sound exists only in several languages in the whole world such as Japanese, Italian, Arabic, Russian. English
ISN'T one of those languages.
If you thought it was, you've been mispronouncing the っ.
2. The term "double consonants" is completely irrelevant in the following cases. Native speakers have no trouble whatsoever in producing the っ sound at the very end of a word where no consonant or any other sound follows the っ. This is very common in casual speech.
We can say:
はやっ How fast!
いたっ Ouch!
これだっ This is it!
みるなっ Don't look!