Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "教える" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 教える in Japanese?

教える is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /o.ɕi.e.ɾɯ/. It means “to teach / to tell.” o-shi-e-ru, four even beats — the shi and the e are separate morae, never "shyeh."

o-shi-e-ru, four even beats — the shi and the e are separate morae, never "shyeh."

教える /o.ɕi.e.ɾɯ/

oshieru

Four slots of identical size, with the melody peaking mid-word. The critical span is shi-e: two vowels in adjacent morae that English wants to bind with a glide. Keep them as two separate pulses and the word's four-beat shape survives; fuse them and it collapses to three.

Listen: 教える

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

Sound it out

o A pure mid-back o opening the word, short and stationary, with no glide toward w.

shi A thin palatal hiss into a short i. It's followed by a vowel rather than a consonant, so this i stays fully voiced.

e A bare short e as its own beat, arriving directly off the i with no y-sound between. This is the join English speakers destroy.

ru One tongue-tap and a flat-lipped u, the familiar verb ending.

Hear it in a sentence

駅の場所を教えてください。

Eki no basho o oshiete kudasai.

Please tell me where the station is.

Listen: 駅の場所を教えてください。

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

駅の場所を教えてください uses the te-form 教えて and stacks it before ください. That gives a long run of morae with no consonant clusters and no length marks — o-shi-e-te-ku-da-sa-i, eight even beats — which is exactly the kind of stretch where English speakers unconsciously accelerate. Keep the tempo flat all the way to the end.

Where English speakers slip

The usual result is "o-SHYE-roo": the shi and e fused, a stress peak, and an English r. That fusion loses a whole mora. Say "o - shi - e - ru" as four deliberate pulses, then speed up while keeping four. Also resist rounding the final u, which is the most persistent English habit in verb endings.