Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
-
Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
-
Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
-
Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
-
Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
-
Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
-
Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
-
If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
-
Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evoloving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
The correct spelling is どうとんぶり or even more precisely 道頓堀
But seriously, try saying it 10 times and check how many times you said it without voicing "m".
Most Japanese, but not all, will pronounce it with an "m". Prior to a labial (p, b, m), ん is generally pronounced "m".
So do most Asians. Infact, our alphabets are arranged according to the sounds - which is surprisingly similar between Indian languages and Japanese.
Well, actually so do most people, I suspect. It's a natural phenomenon. But what's curious is that in japanese, this m/n/ng is represented by a single letter, whereas in Korean, for example, these are quite distinct letters. In fact, Korean has a letter for the ng sound, which we don't. English requires us to use two letters to represent the ng in many cases. In other cases, English just does whatever it wants, and ignores spelling completely. Unlike Japanese and Korean which don't do that.
Really? English alphabet is certainly not arranged according to the sounds. Japanese is, definitely. The Korean alphabet is not.
No, not referring to silly English alphabet which is quite noob when compared to other languages. I specifically referred to Indian languages, even though many asian languages probably has a similar structure. The structure is two dimensional, and left to right goes the vowels and top to bottom goes the consonants.
Japan's vowels go in this order: あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o) Kannada (one of South Indian languages, but all Indian languages are similar) goes like this
It has lot more vowels, including extended sounds, but the order is the same.
As for consonants, the letters are arranged as per the position of the mouth. K/G (guttoral) Ca/Ja (tongue at mid palette) Ta/Da/Na (Tongue at front of the palette) Pa/Ba/Ma (Lips touch) Then comes miscelleneous consonants.
Japanese is very similar with a few differences. Ca row is replaced by Sa as they both have very similar tongue positions. Pa/Ba is replaced by Ha which, when modified becomes Ba and Pa respectively.