What are effective techniques for teaching Japanese nasal sounds

Effective techniques for teaching Japanese nasal sounds, particularly the nasal “ん” sound, include the following approaches:

1. Minimal Pairs Technique: Using minimal pairs—pairs of words that differ in only one sound—helps learners distinguish the nasal sound from other similar sounds. This technique has been found effective in improving recognition and pronunciation of nasal sounds along with other challenging Japanese sounds like long vowels and double consonants. ¹

2. Pronunciation Practice with Native Speaker Models: Learners benefit from listening to and mimicking native speakers’ pronunciation of nasal sounds in various word positions (initial, medial, final). Pronunciation training systems designed for Japanese sounds can improve learners’ perception and production abilities. ²

3. The Silent Way Method: This method, which emphasizes student autonomy and self-correction, can be adapted to teaching Japanese phonetics including nasal sounds. It involves focused oral practice and awareness of sound production during lessons. ³

4. Dictation and Listening Exercises: Regular listening practice to distinguish nasal sounds and dictation exercises where learners write what they hear can reinforce proper pronunciation and differentiate nasal sounds from similar sounds. ^{4, 5}

5. Explicit Phonetic Instruction: Teaching the articulatory features of the nasal sound, such as the position of the tongue and airflow through the nose, helps learners understand how to correctly produce the nasal sound.

These approaches combined can effectively help learners grasp the nuances of the Japanese nasal “ん” sound in speaking and listening contexts. ^{5, 1, 2, 3, 4}

References

• The Effectiveness of the Minimal Pairs Technique in Learning Japanese Pronunciation

• Nihongo Speech Trainer: A Pronunciation Training System for Japanese Sounds

• Applying the Silent Way in Teaching Japanese Language to University Students in Taiwan

• Dictation Technique in Hiragana Writing: Implementation and Result

• Errors in Learning Japanese through Listening-Misheard Cases-

• Phonological Process of Word-Final Consonant Sounds in Indonesian Learners by Japanese Speakers (Case Study of Japanesia Online Course Students)

• Exploring Pronouncing English Sounds : Book Review For Japanese Language Learners

• Nasal sounds generation and pitch control for the real-time hand to speech system

• Analysis on Current Situation, Problems and Main Causes of College Japanese Teaching—Taking Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute as an Example

• PHONOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE IN THE SPOKEN ENGLISH PERFORMED BY JAPANESE SPEAKER IN TEACHING PROCESS OF MIND YOUR LANGUAGE VIDEO

• Blind nasal intubation: teaching a dying art

• The Attitudes and Opinions of College-Age Japanese EFL Learners to Reading Aloud as a means of Increasing Oral Fluency

• The Utilization of the “Tsutaeru Hatsuon” Online Media in Learning Japanese Accents and Intonations

• Representing the moraic nasal in Japanese: evidence from Tōkyō, Ōsaka and Kagoshima

• Approach to teaching active listening in the age of artificial intelligence: Lessons from the Japanese art of aizuchi.

• JVS corpus: free Japanese multi-speaker voice corpus

• JSUT corpus: free large-scale Japanese speech corpus for end-to-end speech synthesis

• Lexical Category and Downstep in Japanese

• Formation of the skill of perception of pitch accent at the initial stage of learning the Japanese language

• Voice onset time is necessary but not always sufficient to describe acquisition of voiced stops: The cases of Greek and Japanese

• Applying adaptive recognition of the learner’s vowel space to English pronunciation training of native speakers of Japanese