English pronunciation for Japanese speakers

Why your list is different

Japanese has one sound sitting between English L and R, which makes that pair the single most consequential contrast. Its syllable structure wants a vowel after almost every consonant, which breaks English clusters apart and adds syllables to the ends of words.

In short: Japanese has one sound between English L and R, so that pair leads, then the word endings English keeps and Japanese does not.

日本語には英語の L と R の中間の音が一つしかないので、まずこの組から。次は、英語だけが残す語尾です。

These are ordinary first-language transfer patterns, the kind any teacher who works with Japanese speakers predicts before the student opens their mouth. They are not measurements of you. Test each contrast below and keep the ones you genuinely cannot hear.

The order worth working in

Work one contrast at a time, five to ten minutes a day, and do not start the next until the current one is boring. Three at once is already too many.

1. R

English R is made without the tongue touching the roof of the mouth. A tapped or trilled R, or one that leans towards L, is heard as a different word.

How to make it. Pull the tongue back and slightly up without letting it touch anything, and round your lips a little. It should feel like nothing is happening.

Test yourself: right / light · correct / collect · arrive / alive · road / load

2. L

The tongue tip touches behind the top teeth and stays there. Where a language treats L and R as one sound in different positions, the English pair merges.

How to make it. Press the tip of your tongue to the ridge behind your top teeth and hold it there while the voice runs around the sides.

Test yourself: light / right · collect / correct · alive / arrive · lock / rock

3. V

English V is made with the top teeth on the bottom lip and the voice on. Languages that lack it usually replace it with B, F or a W-like sound, and the replacement changes the word.

How to make it. Rest your top teeth lightly on your bottom lip, then turn your voice on and let it buzz. If your lips touch each other, you are making a B.

Test yourself: vet / wet · vine / wine · fan / van · safe / save

4. TH as in "think"

The tongue tip sits between or just behind the teeth with no voice. Most languages do not have it, and substitute T, S or F.

How to make it. Put your tongue tip lightly against the back of your top teeth so air escapes around it, and do not add your voice.

Test yourself: think / sink · three / tree · path / pass · thin / tin

5. TH as in "this"

The same tongue position as "think" with the voice on. It appears in the most common words in the language, so the substitution is heard constantly.

How to make it. Same tongue position as "think", then add your voice. You should feel the buzz in your throat.

Test yourself: they / day · breathe / breeze · other / udder · then / den

6. Consonant clusters and word endings

English runs consonants together and releases them at the end of a word: strengths, asked, texts, world. Adding a small vowel between them, or dropping the last one, adds or removes a syllable, and English keeps its grammar in exactly that position.

How to make it. Say the ending on its own first, then attach it to the word without a vowel between. Slow is fine; inserting a vowel is not.

Test yourself: walk / walked · cat / cats · he ask / he asked · six / sixth

What you can skip

Japanese does not hand you any of the English contrasts outright, so there is nothing here to cross off. That is not bad news: the list above is short and ordered, and working it in order is far quicker than working an undifferentiated syllabus of forty sounds.

What you can skip is everything not on it. Vowel colour, sounding native and the accent you happen to have are not on the list, and none of them decide whether you are understood.

How to practise one of these

The sequence matters more than the hours, and the first step is the one everyone skips.

Hear it before you say it. Take a pair from the list, have something say one of the two words at random, and name which you heard. If you cannot do this reliably, producing the sound will not help: you will approve of your own wrong version every time, because it matches what you think you heard.

Then say it alone, slowly and too big. Exaggerate. You will lose roughly half of any exaggeration when you speed up, so aim past the target.

Then put it in words, in all three positions. Start, middle and end. A sound you can manage at the start of a word often collapses at the end, and the end of the word is where English keeps its grammar.

Then use it in something you were going to say anyway. A sentence about your day, at normal speed, unscripted. This is the only step that transfers into a real conversation, and it is where most practice stops short.

Checking yourself without a teacher

Your own ears are the problem: you hear what you meant to say rather than what you said.

Record a sentence and listen to it a few hours later. The delay matters, because played back immediately your memory of the intention writes over what you actually hear.

The quickest outside check is the free pronunciation checker: read one sentence aloud and it scores each word and names the sounds that fell short. No account, and the recording is deleted once it has been scored.

Then use a transcript. Speak into anything that turns speech into text and look at which words come back wrong. It is a blunt instrument, and speech recognition is measurably less accurate on accented English, so it will sometimes mark you wrong when you were right. What counts is repetition: a word it gets wrong across different sentences on different days is a real signal, and a one-off is noise.

How Speakle handles this

Speakle builds the pronunciation path from the language you already speak, using the same list as this page. The contrasts Japanese merges are pulled to the front. Each sound is worked in the four-step order above rather than as a quiz, starting with an ear-training step, because hearing the difference is what makes correcting yourself possible.

The sounds you miss during ordinary speaking sessions feed back into what you are given to practise, so the list stays yours rather than staying the one on this page. Sounds are named the way a teacher names them, by a word you already know and the letters that spell it, unless you turn phonetic symbols on. And every session shows you the transcript it scored, so you can tell a genuine mistake from the recognition mishearing you.

If you want the wider picture first, the pronunciation guide covers what actually stops people being understood, and the English speaking hub covers the habit all of this sits inside. The free speaking test needs no account.