First, I would like to write about the expected readers of this blog.
Of course, this blog will be written for Japanese language learners. Therefore, people who have never really studied Japanese at all may sometimes find it difficult to understand the content of the articles. It is preferable if you have studied Japanese for at least two or three months. Furthermore, this blog may not necessarily be suitable for all learners of Japanese. If you are a grammar nerd, or if you get sidetracked and interested in various areas when studying, or if you are someone who is bothered by details that everyone else is not, then this blog may be for you. On the other hand, if you don’t care about the details and are able to study Japanese smoothly and to the point, you may not find the articles on this blog very interesting.
My mother tongue is Japanese while English is a foreign language to me. I spent a lot of time and struggled with learning English. And even now, I continue to study it. Linguistically, Japanese and English are two languages that are quite far apart. In other words, they have little in common with each other. Therefore, it is more difficult for English speakers to learn Japanese than for many other languages, and vice versa. I have set up this blog in the hope that I can be of some help to those who are facing this challenge. I could not be happier if you read this blog and discover something new and broaden your world.
In this blog, each article is basically independent, complete in its own right. This means that there is no such thing as having to read previously written article B before reading a certain article A. If you need to do so, I will provide a link to the previous article in the article, or explain it again.
Now that I have said all that, I would like to talk about the title of this article, “A I U E O”. “A I U E O” is “A B C D E” in English. In English, the first five letters of the alphabet are “A B C D E”, whereas in Japanese they are “A I U E O”. The Japanese language has three writing systems – hiragana, katakana and kanji – of which hiragana is used to express “あ い う え お”. However, people who have never studied Japanese at all do not know how to pronounce “あ い う え お”. So, for convenience, the English alphabet “A I U E O” is used. But here is a big trap. Many Japanese language teachers explain in their first Japanese lessons that “あ い う え お” is “A I U E O” in English. For example, ‘あ’ is ‘A’ in “ant”. This way, learners can use their knowledge of English to get a rough idea of the pronunciation of an unknown language, Japanese. Strictly speaking, however, ‘あ’ is not the ‘A’ in “ant”. It is obvious, but there is no one-to-one correspondence between the Japanese alphabet and the English alphabet. This is just a matter of convenience, where similar sounds from the English pronunciation are tentatively applied.
In linguistics, there is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is a phonetic notation system that uses symbols to represent each sound in human speech. It covers all languages spoken on the earth. However, it is difficult to use IPA to express sounds correctly. While the pronunciation of English can vary enormously depending on the preceding and following letters, the pronunciation of Japanese can also vary slightly depending on the preceding and following letters. Therefore, even with IPA, it is difficult to express ‘あ’ in a strictly correct one-to-one manner. So how should we learn the pronunciation? Technically, the only way is to learn ‘あ’ as ‘あ’.
I do not blame the many Japanese language teachers for explaining that the pronunciation of ‘あ い う え お’ is the English ‘A I U E O’. Because that method is efficient and roughly correct. However, some learners, especially those who have not studied a foreign language deeply, understand that the pronunciation of ‘あ い う え お’ corresponds exactly to the English ‘A I U E O’. This is a misconception, and I believe that this misconception is actually one of the factors that often hinder the progress of pronunciation. My personal view is that although it is fine to teach that the pronunciation of ‘あ い う え お’ is ‘A I U E O’ in English as an initial introduction, once the learners have mastered hiragana, ideally they should be able to pronounce ‘あ’ as ‘あ’ without having to replace it with ‘A’ in their brains. I think that would be ideal.
By the way, having said all this, I actually think that most learners of Japanese don’t need to worry that much about pronunciation. If you are aiming to become a news announcer or voice actor in Japan, or unless you have a special reason for simply wanting to study pronunciation as a hobby or something, I think it is enough just to be able to understand Japanese.