Page 39 - Basic Japanese

Just as we hear Japanese ai and ae alike, we tend to hear

Japanese au and ao the same. Listen carefully to the
difference between these pairs:

[cue 01-9]

kau buys
au meets

kao face
ao blue

Do kau and au seem to sound like English cow? Do kao

and ao seem to sound like English ow? The following chart
will give you an idea of the difference in pronunciation. As
you can see, this chart is a mirror image of the one above.

Since any vowel can follow any other vowel in Japanese,
it is natural that a vowel can follow itself. These double

vowels are sometimes called LONG VOWELS because, being
two syllables, they take twice as long to pronounce as the

short ones. In the Hepburn Romanization of Japanese, which
this book uses, the double vowels are usually written with a

macron (-) over the simple vowel, except in the case where
there is a morphological boundary, as in oishi-i ‘delicious.’