How to pronounce "Wakizashi"?

M

m10commander

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May 8, 2005
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Hi guys, I know it's a stupid question but anyone know how to pronounce "Wakizashi" a short samurai sword? Thanks
 
Hold your sword over your head and scream it as you bring your sword down.
It's very intimidating. :D
 
Wakizashi = Wah key zah she

a as in father
e as in eh?
i as in key or ski
o as in go
u as in use
ai = ahee but if said fast enough sounds like our long "I"
"R" is pronounced half way between our R and L
Sometimes "U" is silent as on the end of "desu" or in sukiyaki (ski yah key)
 
Thanks Yuzuha! I asked a Japanese friend & even he doesn't know how to prononce it but he knows what it means. Thanks again :)
 
What yuzuha said is all good, but to clarify, the "u" sound would be better identified as close to the u in "ruse."

(Just because you might translate the u in "use" as a "yu" sound)

I've heard Americans say "waki," pronounced like "wacky." That's amusing yet mildly depressing. I can never bring myself to correct them :)
 
I find it strange that your Japanese friend wouldnt know the proper way to say it. Japanese sounds do not change. A person can be taught to correctly pronounce romaji in about 5 minutes.
 
Quite true but then the inflection is different too... we say "Ah KEY rah" Kurosawa while they seem to say it "AH key rah". Then there is the "F" which can often sound like an "H" and "D" and then there are the long vowels which are simply said longer (we don't use durration so often don't notice it, but it makes a big difference... for example, the long O is often written as OU, OO or just an O with a ¯ over it, but we often drop this distinction when we write or say "Tokyo" and "gyuto", which both have long "O"s and should be written Toukyou or gyutou. But, then there is "Koumon", with a long "O" it means "advisor", but if you don't pronounce that "o" long enough, it means "anus")
 
It could also have been the romanization - there are at least two distinct systems that I know of, and there are tons of ways to romanize individual words. If the word was spelled out in English, and the Japanese speaker wasn't already familiar with it, then I can see how he might not have been sure of its pronunciation.

I see tons of Japanese words of English origin that I can't make out until I look them up, so it's a pretty universal thing, I think.
 
Could be. There is a lot of borrowing... orchestra in Japanese is okesutora (using red to indicate a long vowel). That is sort of long and they like to abreviate things so often drop the endings off of words (thus "cash register" becomes "reji") and combine them with other words like "kara" (emptiness)... combine with okesutora and you get karaokesutora, shorten and you get karaoke which means "empty orchestra" (or "orchestra with a hole in the middle"), which we borrowed back into English (and should pronounce as "Ka-ra-OH-keh" rather than "carry-oh-key", which I often hear).

Baketsu means bucket or pail, so "karaoke" is also a pun on "empty bucket" (which seems approprite since most people couldn't carry a tune in a bucket :D )
 
I think it ought to be clarified that romaji is pretty much just a learning tool. The Japanese language does have its own "alphabet". In romaji, things are often spelled differently and therefore pronounced differently. In hiragana and katakana, pronounciation is very very simple. Sounds do not change in hiragana or katakana. But romaji often inacurrately translates hiragana and katakana. The word Tokyo in Japanese is represented by 3 characters. 2 pieces of the Japanese alphabet. The character that represents kyo is one of the combination sounds, a mixture of ki and yo. The i sound is dropped when represented by this combination sound. So, Tokyo would be pronounced to-kyo, not to-ky-o.
 
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