What is the correct pronunciation of Doruge and Frankenruge?

I can spell but at a complete loss when it comes to pronunciation.

Is it Doe-roogie ? Dor-U-Gee (as is gee whiz) ? ? ?
etc

Why isn't Google on top of this with some sort of language pronunciation tool?!?!

doh (like Homer says it) - roo - gay. (The emphasis is on the 'doh')

fuh - ran (rolled R) - ken - roo - gay. (The emphasis is on the 'ran' and 'roo')

Something like that anyhow...

What about Rangeas?
Range-ass?

ran (rolled 'R') - gee (like 'gee whiz') - ah - su. (emphasis on 'gee').

This one is actually written "ran-ji-a-su," so the romanization chosen is sort of misleading.

Btw, any of you fluent folks feel free to correct me...

Thank you!

I love this thread.

Forgive my ignorance, but I thought when speaking Japanese there was no emphasis on any syllable.

Please build on this thread if you have questions about pronunciations

That's a bit of a misnomer. Emphasis doesn't work quite the same way it does in English and is not nearly as emphatic, but there are stressed sylables in a lot of words. It's more like a two tone system (high & low tone). If you listen to formal Japanese used, say, by a tour guide or in recorded instructions, you can really hear it.

really? i thought it was more lengthening and shortening of vowels. i.e. using a small hiragana tsu to shorten, and i think you just use a - to lengthen, although that might be katakana, not sure if that's used in hiragana, it's been 13 years since my last lesson.

also ge is not really pronounced like gay, it's shorter, more like ge in get

anyway i'm surprised someone who actually speaks the language hasn't actually weighed in on this

I speak it, but not native!

long & short syllables are not related to emphasis/tones (though it's used a lot in katakana to approximate emphasis patterns in "foreign" words). For example the word "souryouji" (consul general) has two long syllables followed by a regular syllable. The "tone" pattern, however, goes low-high-low, which means the "emphasis" is on the second syllable.

This is cool....more! more!

i was pronouncing Rangeas correctly even tho i was winging it and liked the way it sounded the way i was saying it so glad it wasn't wrong!

Yeah, that's probably a better approximation of the sound. Doruge and Frankenruge end up sounding a bit more like 'gay' than 'geh' perhaps because of the ending -E sound (although the GE-I in Sandagei, a.k.a. Thundergay, is actually the 'gay' sound- no comment on that other thread intended...).



Good explanation, thanks. I sort of recall this from my language classes, although I probably wasn't paying attention. They tried to teach me stroke order for kanji as well, without success. I did it the Max Power way.

It is the geh or get sound, although I think 'gé' is slightly easier to understand/say/spell the sound if you can pronounce the accented é (spanish,french etc)
The 'e' sound is supposed to end abruptly.

I think you hear the 'y' sound in it slightly because like any language people tend to slack off pronouncing things exactly as learned/taught.
And also Japanese has tendency to stretch sounds, specially ending letter sounds, and when you stretch the letter ゲ it sounds slightly more like "gay"
For example, the word 'game'
In Jpnese its ゲーム, there are only 2 letters in that word in Jpnese, Gé & Mu but the line in between stretches it to sound like - Gé(y)mu and its only a very weak 'y' sound in there.

thanks for all additions people! vog I stand corrected, that is interesting to learn. are there lots of variables within the tone pattern or does it always follow that low-high-low structure?

I've been wondering about some toy pronunciation stuff for a little while now, and thought I'd do a little search here. Found this thread, so I'm going to revive it.

I saw it mentioned somewhere else, but M1GO is pronounced em-ichi-go (ichi being Japanese for 1). I also recently found out that T9G is pronounced something like ta-ku-gee (kyu being Japanese for 9). Do you guys pronounce them this way when you read them in your head? Or do you read them with English pronunciations (em-one-go / tee-nine-gee)?

Also, how is "sofubi" pronounced?

^^ On quite a few YouTube vids i've heard Japanese say sofubi like you'd think . . . Soff-oo-bee


i attended a Japanese language class a while ago and asked the teacher how you pronounce 'Hayao' as in 'Hayao Miyazaki'.
She had no idea . . . i suppose if I'd written down the Japanese characters she could of told me.

I did learn the Mt. Fuji is actually pronounced like 'Hoojee'. And 'Yen' is pronounced without the 'Y', as in 'En'.

Great thread revival James. For myself, it really depends on the name for the most part. i.e. for a very Japanese name I will tend to use the actual pronunciation to myself, whereas for some of the anglo- or romanised ones it can go either way. For M1-Go, for example, I tend to think of 'em one' but purely for simplicity sake, probably because I am lazy.

As for 'sofubi,' while there are three distinct syllables, the middle is very soft and rapid, hence it sometimes being written as sofvi. The actual pronunciation is ソフビ, so the three syllable are clear with a cursory understanding of kana, but can sound different in speech (and depending on accents of course). Thanks to Bill for pointing out that "sofubi" is the result of the common Japanese practice of concatenating truncated foreign words, in this case, "soft vinyl." Although I never had the chance to progress much in the language when I was in Japan, a basic level (or even just referring to kana tables) can help decipher [somewhat] close pronunciations of the Japanese. But the blending of syllables/sounds, accents, and correct intonation are a whole other matter. I am no linguist, but my understanding is that this is based on different timing structures (Japanese being mora-timed, English and other European languages being stress-timed, and the romantic-based ones being syllable-timed).

Oh, as to Fuji, it is correct that the 'F' sound and 'H' sound are essentially used interchangeably (this is similar to the 'L' and 'R'). You can see this specifically with the H and U together, forming a soft 'fu' rather than a hard 'hu.' There are essentially only 15 primary consonant sounds in Japanese (which can be combined with 'y' into additional digraphs). Again, I am not even remotely Japanese-capable, this is just the basic syllabic setup - an average 2-year old would know more than I.

Now back to those toy names.

I love Anglicisms in language.

This is my particular Favorite, while not japanese, some of the same rules apply:

Wow I never saw this thread prior to today. Great topic.

This one I wonder about. I've always pronounced Rangeas as "ran-geas". I figured since t9g (which is t-ku-g) names it with a romanized name, it was pronounced as such. After 6 years of saying ran-geas, ran-jias sounds weird to me.

Isn't it pronounced SOFF-BEE as opposed to SO-FOO-BEE?

Rikki gave a handy lesson on its pronunciation at this years NYCC. That being said, chances are I am STILL mis-pronouncing it

at self...