NoneOfUrBusiness

That… Is all true. I guess I was basically spreading misinformation.

Must be the Hummus terrorists.

Agree that it’s irrelevant here, but conservative estimates put the number of dead in Gaza at 200k+. It’s definitely not just 45k for a few reasons.

I mean ask the 122 countries that did.

TIL. I apparently picked it up naturally but I feel for people who have to actually learn this.

(and it really is based on syllables, not mora)

It’s not though? Pitch can and does change (either rise or drop) mid-syllable no?

Is there anything that lays out the differences?

I’m not sure if they’re neatly explained somewhere, but the short of it is that sh, j and ch are “smoother” than the English versiond. They’re literally just s, z and t respectively, with an i next to them and smoothed over for ease of pronunciation because otherwise it’s a pain to say “si” (languages that do have this sound, like English, have ways of coping with this, but Japanese doesn’t). In English the equivalent of this is how drink is actually djrink and two becomes chuu, but anyway the point is that thinking of these three sounds as coping mechanisms rather than independent sounds should help. Listen carefully to a Japanese shi and you’ll hear the remnants of an s in it. You’ll probably have some luck looking these sounds up on YouTube.

W is a bit simpler; it’s just uw instead of a plain W, in the same way the English version lets out a bit of air before the W itself. Just insert a small u before watashi to make it uwatashi and you’ll get pretty close. Again YT should help. BTW to help appreciate the difference, when the Japanese try to emulate the English W sound they add a ho first, as in howaito (white).

I’ve basically given up on feeling like I’ll ever be totally comfortable in the language anyway.

My strategy is watch tons of anime (or your Japanese media of choice) with English subtitles. As long as you don’t depend completely on the subtitles and try to listen to the words being said it’s a pretty effective way of learning the language in my experience. Simple manga (or, again, your Japanese written media of choice) also does wonders.

Edit: A bunch of stuff here is wrong, see below.

I mean the list of US presidents who supported Israel to the extent Biden did is pretty short.

After that talk Biden came to Yahweh.

I meant the same in terms of the actual sound that comes out.

I mean according to Wikipedia,

Some scholars have claimed that the term “pitch accent” is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

And yeah ん is messed up but aren’t three of these the same sound? I’d say it’s more five different pronunciations rather than seven, which still a lot but would match with my understanding of it as English+2.

Let the shitshow begin.

Neither. Japanese has two tones, high and low (for comparison Mandarin has 4 and Cantonese has I think 7), and each vowel/vowel+consonant in a word takes one of these two. For example there are a bunch of words pronounced koukai in Japanese and they’re split 50/50 on whether their tone is high low low low or low high high high, and the words oyster and persimmon (both kaki) are famous for having opposite tones, one low high and the other high low.

By the way Japanese straight up doesn’t have stressed syllables so the idea of a tonic syllable doesn’t really translate to the language.

TIL… All of this.

Isn’t this in European terms? Europe as a whole is extremely good at English compared to the rest of the world.

Why so? Remember that Lebanon’s preferred second language is French, not English.

as all the usual sounds are represented within our phonology

Is what you’d think, but nope. Their r, sh, j, ch and w and u sounds are slightly different from English (enough so that some languages have the English version and the Japanese version as independent sounds), the lone n consonant has a pronunciation not existent in English, and Japanese has a tone system but it’s simple enough a foreigner can get by without knowing it. That is to say, Japanese pronunciation is very different from English and decently hard to master, but if you just pronounce it like you would English (without stress of course, absolutely don’t add stress) you shouldn’t have a problem getting your point across.

Russian and Arabic consonant clusters

Wait Arabic consonant clusters? If anything Arabic has less consonant clusters than English. As a native Arabic speaker what I would think is a problem for English natives is the consonants themselves, because we have a lot of them and many don’t exist in English.

I mean maybe but now Republicans have a majority. Still not “democrats performing well”.

I don’t know if the author is coping or if they actually believe this.

Despite his win, Democrats performed unexpectedly well in down-ballot races, flipping Senate seats in swing states Trump carried and maintaining the House balance.

Uh… They lost the Senate what the fuck is this guy even talking about?

That’s a very idealistic position. English is either useful or necessary in many situations and fields, and having a population that doesn’t know English can and will cause problems. How well people in a country speak English is an important metric for that country’s development, otherwise nobody would care about it.