Japanese Vowels

All languages have rules and Japanese is no exception. The first rule presented in this lesson explains how to pronounce the vowels in Japanese. Of course the Japanese language has the same vowels as English, namely: a, i, u, e, and o. The difficult thing to master when learning English is the different way to pronounce the vowels. For example, the vowel “a” can be used in the words “father”, ”ate”, and ”bat”. Each of these words pronounces the letter “a” differently. Go ahead and say them out loud a few times to hear the difference. The great thing about the Japanese language is that there is only one way to pronounce each vowel. Here is a list of the vowels with an English word that shows an example how to pronounce each vowel.

a pronounced “ah” as in “father”
i pronounced “ee” as in “feet”
u pronounced “oo” as in “boot”
e pronounced “eh” as in “met”
o pronounced “oh” as in “no”

Practice these vowels by saying out loud “a i u e o” over and over again so you can remember their pronunciations. People may look at you funny but you know you are cool so it doesn’t matter what they think, right? See you at the next lesson!