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Mora

Every Japanese word is made up of mora, which is the basic timing unit in Japanese. What this means is that: a word of two morae should sound twice as long as a word with just one mora; a word of six morae should sound three times as long as a word with two, and so on. Each mora takes up about the same amount of time.

The following take up one mora:

• a single vowel
• a consonant and a vowel
• a consonant, -y-, and a vowel
• /N/ (see below)

Whereas these situations require two morae:

• a doubled consonant (for example, "kata" is 2 morae, "katta" is 3)
• the second half of a long vowel (so all syllables with long vowels take up two morae)

Each mora is pronounced for the same length of time. This means that a syllable with a double vowel sounds twice as long as a regular syllable with a short vowel; a syllable ending on /N/ sounds twice as long as one without, and a word with a double consonant in it has a pause that sounds just as long as a regular syllable.

For each mora, Japanese has a kana character which you will learn in the next section. A compound syllable is written with two kana, and we'll show them to you after introducing the basic mora. Mora never end with a consonant (except for the standalone /N/ character). Edit

Combinations

By combining the consonants and vowels, the following mora (syllabic sounds) can be made. Notice some mora, in bold, have a slightly modified sound. Though an "h" is used to spell "hi", its pronunciation ç is different from the h in "ha", "he", and "ho".

Clear							Voiced							Plosive
	a	i	u	e	o			a	i	u	e	o			a	i	u	e	o
	a	i	u	e	o
k	ka	ki	ku	ke	ko		g	ga	gi	gu	ge	go
s	sa	shi	su	se	so		z	za	ji	zu	ze	zo
t	ta	chi	tsu	te	to		d	da	ji	zu	de	do
n	na	ni	nu	ne	no
h	ha	hi	fu	he	ho		b	ba	bi	bu	be	bo		p	pa	pi	pu	pe	po
m	ma	mi	mu	me	mo
y	ya	-	yu	-	yo
r	ra	ri	ru	re	ro
w	wa	-	-	-	wo
n	n

There is a reason why the consonants are arranged in this order: that's the order they appear in the Japanese kana syllabary, as you'll see later. The first column shows the basic consonants. The second shows the "turbid consonants", which are voiced consonants, and the third column shows the "semi-turbid consonants", which consists of just one consonant, p. When these sounds are written in Japanese, you will notice that the second and third columns are written like the first column, but slightly modified.

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Consonant variation

There are a couple of consonants that are pronounced differently from English:

Mora	Approximate sound	Notes
g	give or sing	approximately halfway between these sounds, it is made almost like ng depending on the age of the speaker and, in certain cases, dialect. Nowadays, it is beginning to sound more like our gutturatter g, but the older folks may still say ng, which was also taught in many Japanese grammar classes.
sh, ch, j		sound is made further back along the tongue than in English
ts	bats	try saying "fatso" without the "fa"
f	who (in British English)	blown between the lips, not between the lips and teeth; as if it were a combination of both H+F
r		similar to spanish rolling r, but only trilled once making it sound deceptively like a D to untrained listeners. It may also give off the effect of an L sound when sung by modern J-pop vocalists.

Except for the doubled consonants and the n (which we will cover later), consonants can never end a syllable. They can only begin it.

You can see in the chart how the consonant variations come about:

• "si" becomes "shi"
• "ti" becomes "chi"
• "tu" becomes "tsu"
• "zi" and "di" become "ji"
• "du" becomes "zu"
• "hu" becomes "fu"
• "wo" becomes "o"

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Medial y

The -i line (ki, gi, shi, ji, chi, ni, hi, bi, pi, mi, ri) can be combined with the y- line (ya, yu, yo) to create these combinations:

Clear					Voiced					Plosive
	ya	yu	yo			ya	yu	yo			ya	yu	yo
ki	kya	kyu	kyo		gi	gya	gyu	gyo
shi	sha	shu	sho		ji	ja	ju	jo
chi	cha	chu	cho		ji	ja	ju	jo
ni	nya	nyu	nyo
hi	hya	hyu	hyo		bi	bya	byu	byo		pi	pya	pyu	pyo
mi	mya	myu	myo
ri	rya	ryu	ryo

These are just like regular consonant + vowel syllables, in that it should be pronounced as one mora (syllabic sound).

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-n

There's a special sound, /-n/, that deserves mention. Whenever you see the letter "n", but it's not followed immediately by another vowel or the letter "y", then it's the special /-n/. For example:

• san "three"
• nihon "Japan"
• shinbun "newspaper"
• sensei "teacher"
• tennō "emperor"

This /-n/ is called the moraic nasal.

The pronunciation of /-n/ changes with environment. So it could be pronounced as "m", or "n", or "ng", depending on what sound comes after. The rules get complicated, so just stick with either "m" or "n" for now.

Approximate sound	Situation	Note
n	d, t
m	b, p	shinbun → shimbun

Sometimes we want the capital N rather than the regular consonant n even though the next sound is a vowel or a "y". To show this, we use the apostrophe:

kin'en (ki-n-e-n) no smoking vs. kinen (ki-ne-n) souvenir.
hon'ya - bookstore

The apostrophes shows that the words should be read as kiNeN and hoNya, not kineN and honya (which you would normally expect, because the "n" is followed by a vowel or the "y" sound).

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Devoicing

Sometimes, the vowels i and u are "not voiced" when they occur between voiceless consonants (k, s, sh, t, ch, h, f, b, p) or at the end of a word following a voiceless consonant. This means that you still make the mouth shape for them and let them take up one mora, but the sound is not audible — it's as if you're whispering the vowel to yourself.

Some examples: des- de-su (is) tabemash-ta ta-be-ma-shi-ta (ate)