4 ms·
I don't know if it's my imagination, but the leading mora of 東京 sounds much closer to 藤 than it does to 遠い or 十日. It's not a stress difference, more like there
by jmillikin 6y ago
I don't know if it's my imagination, but the leading mora of 東京 sounds much closer to 藤 than it does to 遠い or 十日. It's not a stress difference, more like there's sort of an ... umlaut ... in there? At least, I've had much more than 50/50 luck guessing the difference when looking up unfamiliar vocabulary from TV or YouTube.
Oddly, Japanese as a second language has a completely different curriculum (including idiosyncratic labels for grammatical constructs) so for all I know this is yet another well-known linguistic quirk taught to third graders but excluded from JSL textbooks.
- marcan_42 6y agoI think you might be right that there is some nonzero difference in the pronunciation of words containing (o)う vs (o)お sometimes, but it's not pronounced as a proper "ou" most of the time; if you need to pick one, you'd go with straight "oo". I just went through a bunch of examples with a Japanese friend and we can't really find a consistent difference between おう and おお, but it seems we agree that trying to pronounce either too far into "ou" land sounds wrong... at least some of the time... It's kind of tricky :-)