日本語の音声・アクセント:─外国人のための発音練習(22世紀アート)

Looks scarier than it really is

As someone who's already read « La phonologie du Japonais » by Laurence LABRUNE and has gone through Dōgen's course on pitch and phonetics, I was a bit disappointed to find no new information in this book. In terms of completeness and presentation of the information, I preferred « La phonologie du Japonais » but that book is written in French while this book has the benefit of being written in Japanese.

In fact, the entire first chapter serves as an introduction to all the phonetics jargon. What helps is that specific phonetics terminology is always introduced with kanji compound + original English word in parentheses so it is quite accessible. For example: 「一つの音素にくくることの出来るいろいろ異なった音のことを『異音』（allophones）と言う。」

As a corollary, this does mean that you may mine a great deal of anatomical words (also accompanied with their English translation in parentheses):

Compared to other phonetics books such as « La phonologie du Japonais », 日本語の音声・アクセント has an added-value in the form of pronunciation exercises and inter-language comparisons.

The exercises are a collection of specially crafted sentences including not only tongue-twisters but also exercises around pitch accent and prosody (e.g. 「庭には二羽、裏庭には二羽、鶏がいます」) .

The “inter-language” comparisons serve to give advice to native speakers of the languages listed below when it comes to learning Japanese phonetics. You'll find info detailing what phonemes are in common, and which ones are not as well as the associated pain points needing extra attention that one may encounter.

Languages compared to Japanese:

1. English (most detailed chapter)
2. French
3. Spanish
4. Portuguese
5. Korean (very detailed)
6. Chinese
7. Filipino

In conclusion, if you're new to Japanese phonetics, this can be an interesting read which looks scarier than it really is — in fact, I'd go as far as to say that the Japanese translation of phonetics jargon is often easier to understand than the English counterpart thanks to kanji. However, if you already know what a 無声歯茎破裂音(むせいしけいはれつおん) (voiceless alveolar plosive) is, you won't learn anything new.