Quote:
Originally Posted by masaegu
No difference for us native speakers. It is the same consonant.
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To get really technical, the "h" row of Japanese don't all start with the same biomechanical motion, or "sound" if you want to call it that:
Wikipedia:IPA for Japanese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
は・へ・ほ all begin with a "voiceless glottal transition [we can say 'fricative-ish']," meaning your vocal cords do not vibrate and the
sound is articulated at the glottis. The same "h" sound occurs all over the place in English. Think hope, happy, help, here, home, hard, hit, and on and on and on. This is the most common English "h" sound. The IPA notation for the sound is /h/.
ひ begins with a "voiceless palatal fricative," meaning your vocal cords do not vibrate, the
middle/back of the tongue is raised to the hard palate, and it is produced by constricting airflow through a narrow channel (i.e., a relatively high amount of air friction occurs, here, between the tongue and hard palate). The same "h" sound occurs in English words like "hue." The IPA notation for the initial sound is /ç/. This is a rarer English "h" sound.
ふ, on the other hand, is a "voiceless bilabial fricative," meaning your vocal cords do not vibrate,
the lips are pulled closely together (but not fully together) ("bilabial" means "two lips," basically), and it is produced by constricting airflow through a narrow channel (here, between the lips). The sound absolutely DOES NOT exist in English (English has no bilabial fricatives). The IPA for this is /ɸ/.
The English "h" has many sounds as well. I already talked about /ç/ and /h/. In Scottish English there's also the /x/ sound (that German-sounding Scottish "ch" in "loch ness"). Then it does other things like affect the "w" in "wh" words (for some places) and change the sound of s, t, p, and s if it follows it (sh, th, ph, sh). But the only real h sounds are the first three I mentioned in this paragraph, and two of them aren't entirely universal in native English speakers (the only universal sound is /h/).
That being said, if you asked a native English speaker if /h/ and /ç/ are the same sound, they'd say "yes" if you asked, "Do 'hue' and 'hello' start with teh same sound?" Because English speakers consider these two sounds to be the same (we do this with other things, too, like aspirated and non-aspirated p, which Spanish and Hindi speakers treat as different sounds).
Similarly, as masaegu said, native Japanese treat /h/ and /ç/ and /ɸ/ as the same sound.
So what I'm trying to say is that it's not actually the same mechanically, and the sound at the beginning of ふ does not, at all, exist in English. The only time you make the sound in Japanese is with ふ. So there's nothing in either language to analogize it to.
Put your lips in an English "p" sound. Now move them about three millimeters apart. Now without moving your lips, try to make the English "h" sound. That's how you make the ふ sound.
Edit This could also spawn discussions about し・じ・つ・づ・ち・ぢ.
Edit 2 Thought I'd brag about my elite が行 pronunciation. It's very NHKish.
What I'm saying here is that がぎぐげご are not necessarily using the same "g" as in English. It depends on where you are in Japan. My pronunciation (and the NHK-style I'm talking about) often uses a "g" like the "ng" in the English word "sing." Suffice to say, reading up on linguistics and phonetics will go a
long way toward improving your pronunciation in a new language.
Unfortunately, things like pitch are not as easy to pick up from a book. I still sound too American for my tastes when I speak Japanese. Which is why I am motivated to brag about the one good piece of pronunciation I have absolutely down in Japanese: my NKH が行. ToT