How to Pronounce 'みんな': Japanese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce みんな in Japanese?

みんな is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /min.na/. It means “everyone / all.” mi-n-na, three beats — the n in the middle is a whole beat of humming before the na arrives.

How do you pronounce "みんな" in Japanese?

mi-n-na, three beats — the n in the middle is a whole beat of humming before the na arrives.

みんな /min.na/

minna

Three morae, and the middle one has no vowel at all. Standard speech puts the accent on the first, so mi is high and the rest fall away. English hears two syllables here and gives two beats; Japanese counts three. The extra time all goes into the sustained nasal in the middle.

Listen: みんな

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Sound it out

mi An m with a short tense i behind it. Half the length of English "me."

n Pure nasal, occupying a beat on its own. Because a na follows, the tongue is already at the teeth-ridge, so this is a sustained n — hum it for a genuine extra count before releasing into the next mora.

na The n releases into a bright short a. The transition from the held nasal to this one is seamless; there's no restart, just a vowel appearing after the hum.

Hear it in a sentence

みんなで公園に行きます。

Minna de kouen ni ikimasu.

We are all going to the park.

Listen: みんなで公園に行きます。

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みんなで公園に行きます attaches で directly, giving four continuous morae before the noun. 公園 is another four (ko-o-e-n): a long o, then a vowel, then a moraic nasal — three different length phenomena in one word. Between them, the sentence is essentially an exercise in giving vowel-less and vowel-only morae their equal share of time.

Where English speakers slip

"MEE-nah" is the standard English version: two syllables with a stretched first vowel and a single flicked n. That loses an entire mora. The fix is to hold the n audibly — say "min" and then keep humming before you open into "na," so a listener can hear the nasal as a beat in its own right rather than as a consonant belonging to either side.