Japanese does not use stress modulation. Each syllable gets the same stress as the next.
D - This sound is a bit heavier than in English. The tongue presses hard against the upper teeth and gums. If you were to move your tongue a little lower down, a th sound would come out.
F - Japanese don’t bite their bottom lips as we do when we say this sound. Let your upper teeth just barely touch your lower lip as you close your mouth naturally. Since there’s no lip-biting, sometimes foreigners hear this sound as an h sound.
R - The Japanese r is the opposite of the English r. It is made by a light flickering of the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth. The closest thing we have in English is the sound that we make when a T or D occurs in the middle of the word (ladder). The sound is similar to the Spanish r, except there isn’t any trilling or rolling. It’s just one light touch.
In English, different letters take up different amounts of space.
Notice that the first stroke of い has a little jump at the end of it. These jumps are called hane in Japanese. The reason for them is that Japanese was originally written with a brush and ink. Think of the hane as a little trail of ink, and notice that it usually points to the next stroke.
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