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- "ふゆ"
66 Comments
A bit of both and neither, really.
The Japanese ふ falls between an F and H sound.
In an English F your teeth clench a bit on your bottom lip, and in an H it tends to tighten around the mouth and not use teeth at all.
For ふ your mouth should be relaxed and the sound should blow lightly past your teeth with them not at all or only lightly touching your bottom lip. There should be barely any mouth movement in "fuyu". No hissing F sound like in english, and no hard H sound like "who".
Kanji is the writing system adopted from China where each individual character has a specific meaning. Japanese has a very small amount of syllables in the language, meaning there are many homophones. Kanji is used to help tell what the word means.
There are also no spaces in Japanese so the combined used of hiragana, katakana and kanji are helpful at telling where one word ends and another begins. They are used for most nouns as well as verb and adjective bases, while hiragana are used for grammatical components.
冬 is the kanji with the meaning "winter"
ふゆ is the pronunciation of the word "winter"
115
The charcter ゆ kind of looks like a fish. In Chinese the word for fish, 鱼 , is pronounced in almost the same way (yú, with an upwards inflection).
From my comment above:
The Japanese ふ falls between an F and H sound.
In an English F your teeth clench a bit on your bottom lip, and in an H it tends to tighten around the mouth and not use teeth at all.
For ふ your mouth should be relaxed and the sound should blow lightly past your teeth with them not at all or only lightly touching your bottom lip. There should be barely any mouth movement in "fuyu". No hissing F sound like in english, and no hard H sound like "who".
97
In some words, the pronunciation changes slightly. Like in English. For example, Konnichiwa (こんにちは) has the Hiragana "は" at the end. Normally this Kana makes a "ha" sound, but in Konnichiwa, it makes a "wa" sound.
509
I don't know if it may help anyone, but I just use the Todorokis (Fuyumi and Natsuo) from BnHA to remeber that fuyu is winter and natsu is summer
They are later in the course. Autumn is 秋・あき, spring is 春・はる
These early skills are for teaching hiragana readings with some basic vocab words so not all seasons (and numbers) are taught immediately. They have their own designated skills later on where the proper kanji forms are covered (Numbers covered in the Time skills, seasons in the Clothes skill).
From above on this page: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/23033248$comment_id=30627846
A bit of both and neither, really.
The Japanese ふ falls between an F and H sound.
In an English F your teeth clench a bit on your bottom lip, and in an H it tends to tighten around the mouth and not use teeth at all.
For ふ your mouth should be relaxed and the sound should blow lightly past your teeth with them not at all or only lightly touching your bottom lip. There should be barely any mouth movement in "fuyu". No hissing F sound like in english, and no hard H sound like "who".