There isn't certainly pauses between words in Japanese. (Actually, I'm not aware of any language that has.) The Japanese disambiguate word boundaries in spoken

There isn't certainly pauses between words in Japanese. (Actually, I'm not aware of any language that has.) The Japanese disambiguate word boundaries in spoken language using the pitch accent as the primary clue. Tokyo Japanese has a phenomenon called initial rise, which differentiates the pitch between the two first moras of an accent phrase – either the pitch rises or steeply falls. Here's an example - upper case: high pitch, lower case: low pitch. KYOu, kaINI iKIMAshita today, to buy I went KYOu KAini iKIMAshita today, to meeting I went kyoUKAINI iKIMAshita to chuckh I went