LingoDrop
Japanese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "同じ" in Japanese?
o-na-ji, three even beats — a soft palatal j, not the harder English one.
onaji
A crest on na, and no unit longer than another. All three vowels are different, which makes the word a decent test of vowel quality: each one should be pure and unreduced, with no drift toward the schwa English would insert in an unstressed position.
Listen: 同じ
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
私たちには同じ問題があります。
Watashitachi ni wa onaji mondai ga arimasu.
We have the same problem.
Listen: 私たちには同じ問題があります。
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私たちには同じ問題があります stacks には after 私たち, giving seven consecutive morae before 同じ arrives. 問題 afterwards is four more (mo-n-da-i) with a nasal beat and a bare final vowel. The sentence is long and entirely free of long vowels, so its whole duration comes from honest mora counting.
Where English speakers slip
"o-NAH-jee" imports English stress onto the second beat and stretches both it and the final vowel. Level the three beats and shorten the i. The j is the subtler issue — English speakers use the tongue tip and add more affrication, where Japanese uses the blade and produces something lighter and closer to the "zh" region.