How to Pronounce 'もっと': Japanese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce もっと in Japanese?

もっと is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /mot.to/. It means “more.” mo-t-to: three beats, and the middle one is a full beat of silence with the tongue already pressed in place.

How do you pronounce "もっと" in Japanese?

mo-t-to: three beats, and the middle one is a full beat of silence with the tongue already pressed in place.

もっと /mot.to/

motto

Three morae for what English reads as two syllables, and the extra one is pure silence. Standard speech puts the accent on the first, so mo is high and the release falls. The discipline is holding the gap: count one on mo, one on the silence, one on to. Rushing the middle turns a three-beat word into a two-beat one.

Listen: もっと

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Sound it out

mo An easy m, then a short pure o. Nothing special here — the interest is entirely in what comes next.

t (small っ) The small っ is a whole mora of held silence. Get the tongue tip into the t position at the end of the mo and simply leave it there, blocking the air, for a full count before releasing. It is not a stressed t or a glottal stop — it is measurable silence.

to The release, dental and unaspirated, into another short o identical to the first. The word ends abruptly with no trailing vowel length.

Hear it in a sentence

もっと時間がほしいです。

Motto jikan ga hoshii desu.

I want more time.

Listen: もっと時間がほしいです。

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もっと時間がほしいです pairs the geminate with ほしい, which has a long i held for two beats. So the sentence contains both of Japanese's length devices back to back: silence added before a consonant, and duration added to a vowel. Saying it slowly, you should be able to point to the four beats' worth of extra time those two words carry.

Where English speakers slip

The trap is "MOT-to" with an emphasised but instantaneous t, because English doubles consonants in spelling without doubling them in sound (compare "better," where the tt is actually a single quick flap). Japanese means it literally. If your もっと takes the same time as ここ or この, you've dropped a mora — insert the silence and let a listener hear the pause.