Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "昨日" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 昨日 in Japanese?

昨日 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ki.noː/. It means “yesterday.” ki-no-o, three beats — the final o is held for two of them, not one.

ki-no-o, three beats — the final o is held for two of them, not one.

昨日 /ki.noː/

kinou

Three slots, two of which belong to a single held vowel. That means the back two-thirds of the word is one continuous sound — a shape that feels strange to English speakers, who expect a word's final syllable to be its shortest.

Listen: 昨日

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Sound it out

ki A light k with palatal colouring before the i, and a short tense vowel. Because a nasal follows, this i keeps its voicing.

nou An n at the teeth-ridge releasing into an o that runs for two full counts. The romaji u marks the length; there's no "oo" sound in the word.

Hear it in a sentence

昨日友達と出かけました。

Kinou tomodachi to dekakemashita.

Yesterday I went out with friends.

Listen: 昨日友達と出かけました。

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

昨日友達と出かけました is a long sentence with no other long vowels, so the held o at the start is the only place anything stretches. 出かけました afterwards is six even short beats. Delivering the long vowel properly and then keeping the rest strictly even is the whole exercise.

Where English speakers slip

"KEE-no" is the usual output: a long first vowel, English stress on it, and a short final o — precisely backwards. Shorten the i, level the emphasis, and hold the closing o for two counts. Learners who have met the word written as "kinou" sometimes also pronounce a separate u at the end, which is equally wrong.