Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "重い" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 重い in Japanese?

重い is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /o.mo.i/. It means “heavy.” o-mo-i, three beats with two matching o's and a bare i at the end.

o-mo-i, three beats with two matching o's and a bare i at the end.

重い /o.mo.i/

omoi

The crest sits on mo, and all three beats are cut to the same size. Because the word is nearly all vowels, its rhythm depends entirely on articulating each one fully — there are no consonants to mark the boundaries for you.

Listen: 重い

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Sound it out

o A pure mid-back vowel, short and unmoving, starting the word without a glottal catch.

mo The lips close for the m, then release into an o identical to the first. Neither o should be longer or clearer than the other.

i One short i, unaccompanied, taking its own full beat off the back of the o.

Hear it in a sentence

このかばんは重いです。

Kono kaban wa omoi desu.

This bag is heavy.

Listen: このかばんは重いです。

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

このかばんは重いです includes かばん (ka-ba-n), three morae ending in a moraic nasal, which gives the sentence a vowel-less beat right before the vowel-saturated 重い. Notice too that かばん's ん sits at the end of a word, so it's made far back with the mouth open rather than closed off crisply.

Where English speakers slip

Untrained, this arrives as "oh-MOY" — a glided first vowel and the last two morae fused into an English diphthong. Freeze both o's so the lips don't move during them, and pulse the final i separately. If your word rhymes with "Chloe," the count has dropped from three to two.