Phonetics Lesson Update! (Patreon)

Good afternoon, Patrons!

How are your studies going? I wanted to let everyone know that I've finished uploading the lesson 12 ground-up remake. I decided to make this video after doing additional research, and because I wanted to create a single consolidated lesson that covers both the traditional vs. newer pronunciations. Spent a lot of time working on this—hope that everyone finds it useful!

Lesson 12 (remake) 

Please read: I've taken the original lessons 12 and 13, as well as the prior lesson 12 remake offline in order to keep the series simple and unified. Please also note that I strongly recommend all Patrons watch this new lesson to get my current advice on the さ conguation of 3 mora downstep i-adjectives. To briefly summarize things here—in the past I said the pronunciation uMAsa was acceptable, and some speakers do say it this way, but the traditional pronunciation—as in Umasa—for this family of word and conjugation in particular is still significantly more mainstream. For this reason, I now currently recommend that all learners go with this traditional pronunciation, though it unfortunately does make the rules surrounding i-adjectives a bit more difficult to remember.

I've also added a small bit to lesson 13 to clarify how to pronounce heiban i-adjectives before です、でしょう、and だろう (in situations like this, it's almost certainly best to pronounce 平板 i-adjectives not with their heiban pronunciations, but with the downstep pronunciations I  break down in the lesson).

As usual, if anyone has any questions or concerns with regards to this post, feel free to leave a comment below! Thank you for your continued support, and good luck with your future Japanese studies!

Dōgen