Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "本" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 本 in Japanese?

本 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /hoɴ/. It means “book.” ho-n, two beats — the nasal is a whole beat of humming, not a consonant closing the syllable.

ho-n, two beats — the nasal is a whole beat of humming, not a consonant closing the syllable.

本 /hoɴ/

hon

Two slots, one of which has no vowel at all. Standard speech puts the pitch high on ho and drops it onto the nasal. English reads one syllable and gives one beat, halving the word — the fix is to hold the hum deliberately.

Listen: 本

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Sound it out

ho A gently shaped breath of h into a stationary short o. Softer than English h, and the vowel doesn't glide toward w.

n A full mora of nasal. At the end of an utterance it's made far back with the mouth still open, closer to the ng of "song" than to a tongue-tip n — hum it and let it resonate.

Hear it in a sentence

面白い本を読んでいます。

Omoshiroi hon o yonde imasu.

I'm reading an interesting book.

Listen: 面白い本を読んでいます。

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面白い本を読んでいます contains 読んで, where the mu of 読む becomes a moraic ん: yo-n-de, three morae with a beat of humming in the middle. So the sentence has two nasal beats close together, both easy to compress into the surrounding syllables.

Where English speakers slip

"hone" — the English word — is almost exactly what learners produce: one beat, a diphthongised vowel, and a crisp tongue-tip n at the end. Every element is off. Soften the h, freeze the o, and hum the nasal for a full separate count with the mouth still open.