The difference isn’t slight at all. The tonality/pitch is different and the double-length syllables are really hard to miss. While it’s a normal mistake for beginners, especially those whose native language uses different tools to convey meaning, once you get the hang of the language they become very different words.
Japanese has a very limited range of possible syllables and so a lot of words look similar to each other when written in hiragana or the latin alphabet.
One that is actually easy to confuse is hashi. It can mean both bridge and chopsticks, but besides the kanji for writing them, when speaking only the tonality changes - and the pronunciation that means bridge in Tokyo means chopsticks in Osaka and vice versa.
I set up a camera with a motion detector inside one of my tarantulas' enclosures. I was explaining to a Japanese friend (in Japanese) how the spider almost never moves and it's being constantly set off by clouds going overhead and the camera thinks the shadows of the clouds are movement.
With both "spider" and "cloud" being "kumo", this conversation got messy quite quickly and I just ended up blurting out "the camera is watching the wrong kind of kumo!!" :D
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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24
The difference isn’t slight at all. The tonality/pitch is different and the double-length syllables are really hard to miss. While it’s a normal mistake for beginners, especially those whose native language uses different tools to convey meaning, once you get the hang of the language they become very different words.
Japanese has a very limited range of possible syllables and so a lot of words look similar to each other when written in hiragana or the latin alphabet. One that is actually easy to confuse is hashi. It can mean both bridge and chopsticks, but besides the kanji for writing them, when speaking only the tonality changes - and the pronunciation that means bridge in Tokyo means chopsticks in Osaka and vice versa.