Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "面白い" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 面白い in Japanese?

面白い is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /o.mo.ɕi.ɾo.i/. It means “interesting / funny.” o-mo-shi-ro-i, five beats — and the last two must not fuse into "roy."

o-mo-shi-ro-i, five beats — and the last two must not fuse into "roy."

面白い /o.mo.ɕi.ɾo.i/

omoshiroi

Five beats delivered at one tempo, and standard speech leaves the word unaccented so the melody rises after o and holds flat. Five-syllable words are where English most insists on a stress peak; this one has none, and three of its vowels are identical.

Listen: 面白い

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Sound it out

o A stationary mid-back vowel opening the word, short and unmoving.

mo A momentary lip closure, giving an o identical to the first.

shi A wispy hiss on the palate with a short tense i. Between two voiced sounds it stays fully voiced here.

ro A momentary tap of the tongue tip on the ridge, then a third o matching the others.

i A quick tense vowel as its own final beat, arriving straight off the o with no glide.

Hear it in a sentence

この映画は面白かったです。

Kono eiga wa omoshirokatta desu.

This movie was interesting.

Listen: この映画は面白かったです。

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

この映画は面白かったです uses the past form, which adds a geminate: o-mo-shi-ro-ka-t-ta, with a beat of held silence near the end. 映画 before it has a merged long e. So the sentence contains a long vowel, five flat beats and a silent one.

Where English speakers slip

"o-mo-shi-ROY" fuses the last two morae and stresses them, cutting a five-beat word to four with an English diphthong at the end. Pulse the ro and i apart, freeze all three o's, and keep the tempo constant — the word is long enough that learners typically start well and then accelerate.