Lesson 7 · ようおん — the contracted sounds

Three small letters, thirty-three sounds

Today's chart adds no new shapes at all. It is や, ゆ and よ written small — and that difference in size is worth more than any single character you have learned since day one, because it is the only thing standing between a hospital and a hair salon.

≈14 minutes · every word checked against Jisho.org · the mora account after Vance, The Sounds of Japanese

Seventy-one characters and not one word longer than five of them. The reason is that a great deal of ordinary Japanese — today, a hundred, hospital, milk, homework — cannot be written at all without the three characters on this page. They are the last piece of the hiragana system, and they are the cheapest one to learn.

1.Only the i column can wear them

A small ゃ, ゅ or ょ never follows just any character. It follows a character ending in -i, and nothing else. Count them and the size of today's chart falls out on its own:

Eleven characters that count, three small kana each: eleven times three is thirty-three. That is the whole chart, and you have just derived it rather than been handed it.

2.The small kana replaces the vowel, it does not add one

Here is the mechanism, and it is one line. き is k + i. Put ゃ after it and the i is thrown away; the k keeps a trace of it — a faint y — and the vowel of the small kana takes over:

き k·i + ゃ y·a → きゃ kya

Not ki-ya. The i is gone. What survives of it is the y, and that y rides on the consonant rather than standing on its own.

Tap any cell to hear it. The word underneath is one common word the sound appears in — proof that the cell earns its place, not something to memorise here.

Six holes, and where they went

Six of the thirty-three cells are dashed. Those sounds are real and they are spelled exactly the way the recipe predicts — there is simply no common word containing them that can be written with the characters this course has taught. That is not the same failure twice:

• ひゅ みゅ びゅ — genuinely rare in Japanese words. They survive almost entirely inside imported words, which are written in katakana: ヒューズ (fuse), ミュージック, インタビュー. Katakana is a later lesson; the sounds will be waiting.
• ぴゃ ぴゅ ぴょ — the ぴ row, and this is the second time it has done this. In lesson 5 the maru row had no two-kana word anywhere in the language, for the reason that a maru kana lives only after ん or after a small っ. The same rule empties it again here. はっぴょう happyō, “announcement”, is a very common word and you cannot write it yet — only one character is missing, and it is the small っ.

Three cells are thin rather than empty. にゃ's one common entry is にゃあ — a cat. みゃ has みゃく and little else, and にょ has にょうぼう. They are in the word list because they are honestly what those rows contain, not because they are useful.

3.Two characters, one beat

This is the whole lesson, and it is the one thing that will not come from reading — it has to be counted aloud until it is automatic. Lesson 4 gave you the rule that every kana is one beat, one mora. A small kana is the exception, and the only one in the writing system:

Nothing about the shapes differs. Only the size does, and the size is carrying an entire beat. Japanese speakers hear that beat the way you hear a long vowel in Arabic — which is to say, they cannot not hear it. Four common pairs turn on it, and all eight words below are ordinary:

4.Where the spelling stops being predictable

Trick 2 gives you all thirty-three readings, with one adjustment on three rows. し, ち and じ are already shi, chi and ji, not si, ti and zi — they were the irregulars of lesson 1. The y that the other rows gain is already inside them, so it is not written twice:

The long-vowel trap that comes with them

Most of today's useful words end in う: きょう, じゅう, ひょう, りょこう. That う is not an extra syllable and it is not pronounced u — it lengthens the vowel in front of it, and it is written ō or ū in romaji. It is also a full beat of its own:

Five characters, four beats, and two of the four are the same sound held twice. ぎゅうにゅう is the hardest word on this page to say cleanly, and if you can tap it out at four you have understood everything section 3 was for.

Writing them

There is no new stroke order to learn — a small ゃ is drawn exactly like や, in the same three strokes, just smaller. What is new is where it sits. Written horizontally, the small kana sits low and left in its square, roughly half the height of a full character; written vertically, it sits high and right. When you write by hand, make it unmistakably small — an ambiguous ゃ is a different word, not a sloppy one.

5.Forty-five words the small kana unlock

The two-character ceiling of lessons 4 and 5 comes off here, and it had to: a yōon is two characters and one beat, so a two-character word would be a single beat, and there is essentially no such thing. This is the first set of ordinary multi-syllable vocabulary in the course — which is precisely what these three characters buy you.

Every word below contains at least one yōon and uses nothing but characters already taught. Twenty-seven of the thirty-three sounds appear; the six that do not are the dashed cells above.

Drill them for meaning

Three directions, as in lessons 4, 5 and 6 — read it, produce it, and straight into Arabic. Wrong answers come from inside the same group first, so the hard calls are the ones the group makes hard: びょういん against にゅういん, りょこう against りゅうがく, きゅう against じゅう.

6.Put one in a sentence

Same frame as lesson 6, and no new grammar at all — 〜は 〜ですか。 with a question word dropped where the answer goes. What is new is that the sentences are finally about ordinary things, because the vocabulary finally reaches them.

〜は 〜ですか。

1. 1.What day is it today?

   Japanese 🔊

   きょうは なんようびですか。

   kyō wa nan'yōbi desu ka

   Arabic 🔊

   أَيُّ يَوْمٍ هُوَ الْيَوْمُ؟

   ayyu yawmin huwa l-yawm

   Three yōon in six characters, and only five beats: kyo · o · wa then nan · yo · o · bi. Lesson 6 gave you なんようび and you could not spell it — now you can.

2. 2.What is your hobby?

   Japanese 🔊

   しゅみは なんですか。

   shumi wa nan desu ka

   Arabic 🔊

   مَا هِيَ هِوَايَتُكَ؟

   mā hiya hiwāyatuka

   The second question anyone asks you in a Japanese class. Japanese leaves “your” unsaid; Arabic attaches it as ـكَ on the end of the noun. Neither language uses a separate word for it.

3. 3.Where is the hospital?

   Japanese 🔊

   びょういんは どこですか。

   byōin wa doko desu ka

   Arabic 🔊

   أَيْنَ الْمُسْتَشْفَى؟

   ayna l-mustashfā

   Say it at four beats. At five you have asked for a beauty salon, and someone will helpfully point you to one.

4. 4.Is this milk?

   Japanese 🔊

   これは ぎゅうにゅうですか。

   kore wa gyūnyū desu ka

   Arabic 🔊

   هَلْ هٰذَا حَلِيبٌ؟

   hal hādhā ḥalīb

   No question word — か alone turns the statement into a yes/no question, exactly as هَلْ does. Japanese puts it last, Arabic first.

5. 5.What time is the class?

   Japanese 🔊

   じゅぎょうは なんじですか。

   jugyō wa nanji desu ka

   Arabic 🔊

   فِي أَيِّ سَاعَةٍ الْحِصَّةُ؟

   fī ayyi sāʿatin al-ḥiṣṣa

   Two yōon in one word and a third in the question: ju · gyo · o. なんじ came from lesson 6 — the frame is old, only the noun is new.

6. 6.Whose photograph is this?

   Japanese 🔊

   これは だれの しゃしんですか。

   kore wa dare no shashin desu ka

   Arabic 🔊

   صُورَةُ مَنْ هٰذِهِ؟

   ṣūratu man hādhihi

   だれの is the “whose” lesson 6 said you would get for free from の, arriving on schedule. Arabic builds it the same way and in the opposite order.

Watch the third column when you copy a yōon chart by hand: きゃ and きょ differ by one small character and are easy to write twice by accident.