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I learnt 塾生 on WK today and was surprised to see that the u at the end of jyuku was pronounced. Usually, the final u is silent in such circumstances. For example, 学生 is gawk-say, not gawk-oo-say. Anyone know why this is?

Also, following a recommendation in devilyoudont's log, I tried watching some Kizuna Ai videos. They're a lot better than the vtuber videos I looked at before. Specifically, I watched her Helltaker video. Unfortunately, I still can't understand much.

I spent over twenty minutes pausing try to to read all the subtitles and onscreen text and using Jisho to look up all the words, but I only got through the first two minutes of the video before giving it up and just watching the rest straight through. On the bright side, there was only one kanji I didn't know. That kanji was 魔, which by pure coincidence, I'll be learning tomorrow morning on Wanikani. I guess that shows how effective WK is at teaching kanji - even the one I didn't know is one I was scheduled to learn in less than a day. Of course, knowing the kanji didn't mean I knew the words, and even after looking up all the words I often still couldn't actually understand the sentences. But it is nice to at least get one part out of the way so to speak. (Not that having studied something on WK means I can reliably recognize or recall it either - I still frequently get similar kanji mixed up in reviews on WK, though admittedly in the wild you have context which helps.)

golyplot wrote:I learnt 塾生 on WK today and was surprised to see that the u at the end of jyuku was pronounced. Usually, the final u is silent in such circumstances. For example, 学生 is gawk-say, not gawk-oo-say. Anyone know why this is?

The conditions for the devoicing of u exist in 塾生 to the same extent they do in 学生, but just because the conditions exist doesn't necessarily mean that it will happen in a particular speaker's particular utterance. There's plenty of variance to how it occurs between dialects and registers, and native speakers don't seem to be conscious of it most of the time, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as you don't elongate those u's too much it won't sound too unnatural.

vonPeterhof wrote:The conditions for the devoicing of u exist in 塾生 to the same extent they do in 学生, but just because the conditions exist doesn't necessarily mean that it will happen in a particular speaker's particular utterance. There's plenty of variance to how it occurs between dialects and registers, and native speakers don't seem to be conscious of it most of the time, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as you don't elongate those u's too much it won't sound too unnatural.

Another thing to be aware of is that some people will make it silent, while others will just devoice it. And the same person may do it differently when saying in the same thing, depending on emphasis, singing vs. speaking, etc.

EDIT: And there are some cases where silencing a sound can be difficult to understand, while devoicing won't be. The difference between "desu yo" and "deshou" is clear with devoicing, but tend to sound almost the same if the "u" in "desu yo" is treated as a slient vowel.

One last consideration on top of what others have already said

According to wiktionary, the pitch pattern for 塾生 is: juKUsei. 学生 on the other hand is of course a flat word.

To make a long story short here, because 塾生 is an accented word, it is more likely that the vowel will be voiced than in 学生. But, different speakers get around the problem of a stressed voiceless consonant in different ways. I don't have access to this study, so here's an unrelated study which I could find which summarizes the typical strategies.

Yoshida (2002, p. 41) discusses three possible realizations of accented high vowels that occur between voiceless consonants. Among them, (5.1) is thought to be most common (Sakurai, 1998). (5)
1. Devoicing occurs, moving accent to the following mora.
2. Devoicing is avoided to realize accent on that mora.
3. Devoicing occurs with accent staying on that mora.19

devilyoudont wrote:One last consideration on top of what others have already said

According to wiktionary, the pitch pattern for 塾生 is: juKUsei.

It isn't. If the accent (i.e. downstep) were on the second mora wiktionary's pronunciation would have been written じゅ↗く↘せい (as you can see in the second pronunciation scheme for こころ) instead of じゅ↗くせい. While unaccented words are often portrayed as being pronounced "flat", the underlying pattern is a low start with a rise from the first to the second mora, with the pattern for the rest of the word described variously as either holding flat or gradually increasing ever so slightly. This is what the arrow system indicates.

As for the interplay between devoicing and accents, realization 2 (Devoicing is avoided to realize accent on that mora) doesn't seem to be very common in Tokyo/standard Japanese. Intuitively it seems that realization 1 is by far the most common, but in practice it's extremely hard for an untrained ear (or maybe for my untrained ear specifically ) to hear any difference between realizations 1 and 3; and yes I've tried, as the old NHK pronunciation dictionary app I have installed on my phone ostensibly has examples of both pronunciations for words like 四季を (シ↗キ↘オ and シ↘キオ, with the vowel in シ devoiced in both cases). Listening to the recordings in succession several times does help notice the difference (or bruteforce the illusion of one into your brain, whichever explanation works ), but when you don't have that option the unnoticeable realization of the i in シ↘キオ creates a sort of illusion that the downstep shifted forward anyway.

Thanks I am used to seeing numbers or lines above for voicing, so I thought this was indicating a downstep following く

Not much to say, mostly because I've been lazy lately. I'm just watching anime with English subtitles instead of studying.

In SAO, when Kirito tells Alice that he'd need two skewers to climb up, I noticed he said "nihon". Obviously it's an object counter of some kind, but I found it kind of amusing since it sounds like Japan. Although I think it was pronounced slightly differently - perhaps that's the elusive pitch accent I hear so much about.


Also, after learning 翔る on WK, I looked up "kakeru" on Jisho again and was once again amazed at just how many definitions it has. Jisho lists six different words with a total of 36 definitions between them! The funny part is that I've seen five of them on WK before, and the last (架ける) is a kanji I recently covered on WK. WK just doesn't have that particular word itself. But despite hitting 駆ける and 賭ける not that long ago, I never made the connection between them before.

golyplot wrote:In SAO, when Kirito tells Alice that he'd need two skewers to climb up, I noticed he said "nihon". Obviously it's an object counter of some kind, but I found it kind of amusing since it sounds like Japan. Although I think it was pronounced slightly differently - perhaps that's the elusive pitch accent I hear so much about.

Fun fact: the Kansai pronunciation of "Japan" is exactly the same as the standard pronunciation of "two long, thin objects" (although from what I hear in Western Japan they use the pronunciation "Nippon" slightly more frequently than they do in Tokyo).

Last night, I hit level 47 on WK, which means I've now officially learned all of the top 500 most frequent kanji. In fact, I've learned all of the top 868, and 996 of the top 1000 kanji. Coincidentally, the remaining four kanji in the top 1000 are all on level 51.

Congrats! That's super impressive!!