Page 64 - Basic Japanese

[cue 01-28]

Dō itashimashite. [dó-o-i-ta-shi-ma-sh-te]

Not at all.

Nihon ni imasu. [ni-hó-n-ni-i-ma-s]
He’s in Japan.

Aoi kimono o kite imasu. [a-ó-i-ki-mo-no-o-ki-te-i-

ma-s]
She’s wearing a blue kimono.

The range of pitch is somewhat wider in English than in

Japanese. When we have a fall, it descends from higher to
lower pitches than the corresponding Japanese fall. To our

ears, the Japanese rises and falls in pitch are very light and
often difficult to catch. They are nonetheless an important

part of Japanese speech. In Standard Japanese there is just
one accent—one fall of pitch—within a phrase. But a given
sentence may either be broken up into a number of small

phrases or read all in one big phrase. It’s possible to say the
sentence meaning ‘Not at all; you’re welcome’ slowly and

deliberately as three phrases: dō itashi mashite. It is more
usual to say it as just one phrase: dōitashimashite. When two

or more smaller phrases are said together as a larger
phrase, the accent of the first phrase stays, but the accent