Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "青" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 青 in Japanese?

青 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a.o/. It means “blue.” a-o — two separate vowel beats, not the single diphthong of English "ow."

a-o — two separate vowel beats, not the single diphthong of English "ow."

青 /a.o/

Two morae made of nothing but vowels, which is where English intuitions fail hardest: English fuses adjacent vowels into diphthongs automatically, so "ao" is heard as one syllable and given one beat. Japanese counts two. Say them as two deliberate pulses until the two-count is stable, then let it smooth out without losing the length.

Listen: 青

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

a A short bright open vowel, articulated on its own beat with the mouth clearly open.

o A pure mid-back o arriving as a distinct second beat. The mouth moves from the a position to the o position, but each vowel is held long enough to be heard as itself rather than as a passing transition.

Hear it in a sentence

空は青いです。

Sora wa aoi desu.

The sky is blue.

Listen: 空は青いです。

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

空は青いです adds a third vowel to make 青い (a-o-i) — three vowels in a row, three separate beats, no consonants at all. It's an extreme case of the same principle, and it's genuinely hard at speed. 空 at the start is also two morae (so-ra) with a flapped r, so the sentence balances a vowel cluster against a consonant one.

Where English speakers slip

Nearly every English speaker produces "ow" or "ah-oh" with a glide between the vowels. Japanese has no glide there: the vowels simply follow one another, each with its own full duration. The second failure is shortening — treating a-o as one syllable's worth of time. Give the word two honest counts and keep both vowels pure from beginning to end.