One of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Japanese is that it is a very precise language. For example, the word for “husband” and the word for “prisoner” only varies by the length of one vowel. It is a metered language, it does not have stresses like in English. The hard part about Japanese is not the vocabulary, though that is hard. It’s not the grammar, though that is hard. The hard part is training yourself to pronounce the words correctly.
I have found, anecdotally, that Japanese people are very rigorous about their language, and they have to be because meter is so important. So if you speak Japanese with a pronounced American accent, then they may not even understand you. And it is possible to speak with an American accent. You do so by not saying ‘r’s correctly, and by stressing syllables. For example, “ha-NA-shi” instead of “ha-na-shi” (and even with the last one it’s all too easy to stress the “shi” instead. That also leads to incorrect vowels, and considering we have eleven more vowels than they do, then that can lead to incomprehensibility, even if you did everything else right.
I’ve been having to train myself to speak Japanese as neutrally as possible. I mostly fail, but it’s at least something I’m trying to notice. There are inflections in the Japanese language, but they tend to affect the entire sentence structure, and not individual words. They seem to use particles instead to indicate emphasis of meaning (“yo” vs. “ne”, for example.)
The opposite is true too, I think. Japanese people seem to often speak a pidgin form of English that overlays our words onto their syllabic structure, and makes for something that’s nearly incomprehensible – and the Japanese don’t often seem to be able to figure out why. It’s because they’re different languages. You can’t apply the rules for English to Japanese, and similarly, you can’t apply the rules for Japanese to English. Just a little bit of effort to understand that not every word has to end with a vowel might go a long way.
But it’s hard. I’m sure that takes about as much effort as it does for me to not stress syllables.
I wonder, sometimes, if I’ll ever get this right.