Anime Japanese · Day 2 of 15
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The contractions you have to hear
The sounds that swallow whole words
This is the lesson that turns anime from noise into language. Spoken Japanese swallows syllables in a small number of regular ways, and once you know the six or seven that matter you will suddenly catch lines you have heard a hundred times. None of this is slang: it is ordinary speech, spoken at speed.
What you hear, and what it is
Each line on the left is the same sentence as the one on the right, said quickly:
These are not four separate facts. They are the same process: Japanese spoken quickly drops or merges the sounds that are hardest to say in sequence, and it does so in regular, predictable ways. If a word sounds like nothing you know, try lengthening it back out before you decide it is new vocabulary.
The shortcuts worth learning first
In rough order of how often they appear:
ています, てしまう and ておく are all things you have met in their full form. Their contracted versions are not new grammar, they are the same grammar spoken at normal speed, which is why a learner who knows the textbook forms can still fail to hear them. Say each pair aloud back to back until the short one sounds like the long one.
Sounds that vanish
Three patterns that account for most of the rest:
って deserves special attention because it does several jobs at once: it quotes, it topicalises, and it replaces という. When you hear a って you cannot place, try reading it as either a quotation mark or a は and one of the two usually works.
Carry over, from earlier days
Check yourself
8 questions. Nothing is saved unless you finish.