Welcome
Welcome to MiniCore Japanese — a small, polite, spoken-only slice of real Japanese for travelers. The whole system is about 300 drilled items slotted into 20 fixed sentence patterns. Before any of that, this lesson tunes your ear and mouth to how Japanese sounds.
There is nothing to memorize in this lesson. Every Japanese word below is a demonstration, not vocabulary — most will come back in later lessons, where you’ll actually learn them. For now: listen, repeat, and don’t worry about meaning.
Everything is written in romaji (Latin letters). The core never requires you to read Japanese script — though you’ll see the native writing alongside each phrase, just so you know what it looks like in the wild. (If you want to read, two optional skills add it: Katakana for the loanword alphabet and Sign Kanji for the survival signs.)
One promise before we start: Japanese pronunciation is easy. There are only five vowels, the consonants are mostly familiar, and there is no stress accent to get wrong. If you can count beats, you can be understood.
The five vowels
Japanese has exactly five vowel sounds. They never change, never reduce, and never glide into each other. Say them short, clean, and pure:
One to watch: u is said with relaxed, unrounded lips — not the tight English “oo”.
e o
The other one to watch: o stays pure — English speakers glide “go” into “gow”; Japanese o just stops.
No diphthongs. When two vowels sit together, each keeps its full identity. This word is u then e — two clean beats, no blending.
hai is not English “high” — it’s ha + i, two beats.
iie
iie is i, i again, e: three beats. Count them in the audio.
Everything runs on beats
English rhythm is built on stress: we squash some syllables and stretch others (ba-NA-na). Japanese has no stress at all. Instead, every word is a string of short, even beats — like a metronome. These beats are called morae, but we’ll just say beats.
Each beat gets the same length and the same weight. Try clapping along:
Three beats, perfectly even: ta-ma-go. Resist the English urge to stress the middle (ta-MA-go) — keep it flat.
Five even beats: ko-n-ni-chi-wa — flat, like a metronome.
sumimasen
Also five beats. sumimasen will become the single most useful word you own (Lesson 1) — for now, just get its rhythm: su-mi-ma-se-n, flat and even.
Why this matters: getting the number of beats right does more for being understood than getting any individual consonant perfect. The rest of this lesson is mostly about the things that count as a beat when English ears don’t expect one.
Long vowels — hold it for two beats
A long vowel is the same vowel held for two beats instead of one. In romaji we write it doubled: oo, ii, aa. This is not decoration — vowel length changes the word.
“Tokyo” is not to-kyo (2 beats) — it’s to-o-kyo-o, four beats. Hold each long vowel like a musical note that lasts twice as long.
Oosaka
Same move at the front: o-o-sa-ka, the first vowel held.
koohii
Both vowels long: ko-o-hi-i, four beats for a two-syllable-looking word.
Two quick beats: bi-ru — a building.
biiru
One held beat is the entire difference between a building (biru) and a beer. Order carefully.
ka-do, two plain beats — a street corner.
kaado
The held first vowel is what makes it a card and not a corner (kado) — and you’ll use this word at every register.
o-ba-sa-n, four beats — an aunt, or any middle-aged woman.
obaasan
The classic warning pair with obasan: hold the a one beat too long and you’ve aged someone thirty years.
Spelling note: in the romaji used throughout this course, a long o is sometimes written oo (Tookyoo, koohii) and sometimes ou (arigatou, ginkou) — both are pronounced exactly the same: a two-beat o. Similarly ei (keitai — phone) is usually said as a two-beat e. And one loanword quirk: ramen is written the way you know it, but said with a long first vowel — ra-a-me-n.
The small pause — doubled consonants
A doubled consonant (kk, pp, tt, ss) means: stop, hold for one silent beat, then release. It feels like a tiny catch or hiccup in the middle of the word — and that held silence counts as a full beat.
Say ki, close your lips for the p and hold one beat of silence, then release into pu. Three beats, one of them silent.
chotto
cho, a held t, to — the tongue parks behind the teeth for the silent beat.
massugu
With ss the held beat isn’t silent — it’s a held hiss: ma-s-su-gu, four beats.
o-to, two plain beats — a sound.
otto
Another meaning-changing pair: the held beat is the only difference between a sound (oto) and a husband.
The n beat
Japanese has one consonant that stands alone as its own full beat: n. When n ends a syllable, it doesn’t attach to the vowel after it — it takes a beat of its own.
Not “kon-bi-ni” said fast — it’s ko, then a full beat on n, then bi-ni. Four beats. Give the n its space and you’ll instantly sound more Japanese.
ginkou
gi-n-ko-o — a beat for the n, and a long vowel at the end: four beats.
konbanwa
Two n beats in one word: ko-n-ba-n-wa, five beats.
The fused beat — kya, ryo, gyu
One more thing that counts differently than English expects: a consonant + y + vowel (kya, kyo, ryo, gyu…) is one fused beat, not two. English ears want to unpack it — “Kyoto” becomes ki-yo-to, a ryokan becomes a ree-yo-kan — but the y glides inside the beat, and giving it a beat of its own is the single most common rhythm mistake English speakers make. You’ve already said one perfectly: Tookyoo — to-o-kyo-o, four beats, and the kyo was one of them.
Three beats: kyo-o-to — the kyo fused, the o held. Say it right and you’ll hear the difference from the “kee-OH-toe” of English travel shows immediately.
ryokan
ryo-ka-n, three beats — the fused ryo plus Lesson 0’s tap-r, both in the first beat. (The word itself is a traditional inn; it gets its own chapter much later.)
gyuunyuu
Two different fusions back to back, each held long: gyu-u-nyu-u, four beats.
kyuukyuusha
The final exam of this section: kyu-u-kyu-u-sha, five beats, three of them fused. Unpacked the English way it becomes a seven-beat tongue-twister; fused, it flows.
And a secret: you’ve been making fused beats all lesson. The cho in chotto and the sha in kyuukyuusha are the same thing — sha/shu/sho, cha/chu/cho, and ja/ju/jo are this fusion wearing different consonants, and English happens to have those sounds already, so they never felt hard.
The Japanese r
The Japanese r is not the English r (no lip-rounding, no growl) and not a rolled Spanish rr. It’s a single, light tap of the tongue-tip just behind your teeth — almost exactly the American English dd/tt sound in “ladder” or “butter” said quickly. To English ears it lands somewhere between r, l, and d.
Say “ladder” a few times, isolate that middle tap, then start ramen with it. And note the long first vowel: ra-a-me-n.
hidari
Tap, don’t growl: hi-da-ri, three beats.
resutoran
A loanword, but with fully Japanese rhythm: re-su-to-ra-n, five even beats.
arerugii
Two taps back to back — a workout. Don’t overthink it: even a plain English l is closer to the target than an English r.
More sounds English gets wrong: fu, tsu & final -e
Three more sounds worth isolating. The big one is tsu at the start of a word — English never begins a word with that cluster, so it needs its own drill.
fu is not the English f — don’t bite your lip. Blow a soft breath between both lips, almost like puffing out a candle. fu-ku-ro, three even beats.
tsu is the ts of “cats” — but at the start of a beat, where English never puts it. Say “cats,” keep only the ts, then launch straight into tsu: tsu-ki, two beats.
tsumetai
The same word-initial tsu, in a word you’ll actually use: tsu-me-ta-i, four beats. (You’ll also hear tsu mid-word — otsuri, change — but the front-of-word one is what trips English speakers.)
A final e is a full “eh.” English turns sake into “sah-kee” and karaoke into “kara-oh-kee” — Japanese never does. sa-ke, two clean beats, the last one short and open.
Vanishing vowels
Between voiceless consonants (k, s, t, p, h) or at the end of a word, the vowels u and i often get whispered to almost nothing. The beat is still there — the vowel just loses its voice. You’ll hear this constantly, because it affects the polite endings you’ll say in every single sentence:
Sounds like “dess” — the u whispers away, but its beat remains.
deshita
desu’s past form, and the same whisper one beat earlier: de-shi-ta comes out “desh-ta.” Every past-tense verb ending does it too — -mashita is “mash-ta” — and you’ll hear that shape at the end of sentences constantly, so teach your ear now that the i is there even when nobody says it.
onegaishimasu
Ends like “mahss” — every verb ending in -masu does this.
suki
Sounds like “ski” — this time it’s the first vowel that whispers away. Copy what you hear, not the spelling — but keep the beat count.
What we’re deliberately ignoring: pitch accent
Japanese words carry a subtle high–low pitch pattern, and yes, a few word pairs differ only by pitch (hashi can mean “bridge” or “chopsticks”). This course ignores pitch accent entirely, on purpose. Context resolves the rare ambiguous pair — nobody at a restaurant thinks you’re asking for a bridge — and the study time pitch would cost buys far more elsewhere. Speak with flat, even beats and you will be understood everywhere in Japan. Don’t fret about it; it’s not part of this system.
How the romaji works
Everything in this course uses standard (Hepburn) romaji. It’s almost entirely “say what you see,” with these reminders:
- Every letter is pronounced. No silent letters (except the whispered u/i above — and even those keep their beat).
- Vowels are always the same five sounds — a i u e o as taught above, no exceptions.
- Doubled vowels (oo, ii, aa) and ou/ei = one vowel held for two beats.
- Doubled consonants (kk, pp, tt, ss) = one silent held beat.
- A consonant + y + vowel (kya, ryo, gyu) = one fused beat — Kyouto is kyo-o-to, three beats, never “ki-yo-to.”
- g is always hard, as in “get” — ginkou is not “jin-ko.”
- e at the end of a word is a full “eh” — sake is sa-ke, never “sah-kee.”
- fu is softer than English f — blow the sound between your lips without biting them (fukuro — bag).
- tsu is the ts of “cats”, just at the start of a beat (otsuri — change).
Sound check
That’s the whole sound system. Here’s the success test for this lesson: hear any word twice, then repeat it with the right number of beats and the right vowel lengths. Meaning doesn’t matter yet.
Try it cold on these — play each one, repeat it aloud, then check yourself against the beat count:
If you can echo these with even rhythm, correct beat counts, and held long vowels, you’re calibrated. Everything from Lesson 1 onward builds on exactly this skill — the words will be new, but the sounds never will be.
Review
An Anki deck is available for this lesson — pure listen-and-repeat cards for every demonstration word above. A few minutes of echo practice before Lesson 1 is plenty. (This deck is the one exception to the course’s usual Anki advice: these are pronunciation cards, meant to be echoed, not translated — drill them now, and once your ear is calibrated, feel free to suspend or retire the whole deck.) The course’s full Anki guidance lives on How to Drill — worth a skim when you import your first real deck in Lesson 1.
Next up: Lesson 1 — Survival glue & repair, where you learn the dozen-and-a-half phrases that carry an entire trip.