LingoDrop
Japanese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "秋" in Japanese?
a-ki, two short beats — a bright open vowel and a soft k with no puff behind it.
aki
A pair of identical beats, with the melody high on the first. Both vowels are short and pure, and there is nothing held anywhere — the word passes faster than English intuition expects from two syllables.
Listen: 秋
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
秋は色がきれいです。
Aki wa iro ga kirei desu.
Autumn has beautiful colors.
Listen: 秋は色がきれいです。
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
秋は色がきれいです ends with きれい, whose "ei" merges into a long e. So the sentence contrasts a word with no length at all against one whose final vowel is held for two beats — a clean before-and-after in a single line.
Where English speakers slip
"AH-kee" stretches both vowels and stresses the first. Halve them both. English speakers also aspirate the k noticeably, which turns a quiet consonant into a percussive one — hold a palm to your mouth and soften the release until nothing hits it.