Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "終わり" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 終わり in Japanese?

終わり is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /o.wa.ɾi/. It means “end.” o-wa-ri, three even beats — a lightly compressed w and a single tap.

o-wa-ri, three even beats — a lightly compressed w and a single tap.

終わり /o.wa.ɾi/

owari

Three beats of matching size, with a crest early. The first two morae are both rounded-ish sounds and can blur into a single stretched "ow" if the w isn't articulated clearly — that consonant is what keeps them as two beats.

Listen: 終わり

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Sound it out

o A stationary mid-back vowel taking a full beat, with no glide toward w even though a w follows.

wa Japanese w squeezes the lips sideways rather than pushing them forward, then opens to a bright short a.

ri The tongue tip flicks the ridge once, then a short tense i. Light contact — press harder and it becomes a d.

Hear it in a sentence

これで映画は終わりです。

Kore de eiga wa owari desu.

This is the end of the movie.

Listen: これで映画は終わりです。

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これで映画は終わりです contains 映画, whose "ei" merges into a long e (roughly "eega"), and ends with the devoiced です. So the sentence has a merged vowel pair in one word and a strictly separated one in another — Japanese distinguishes the two cases by convention, not by rule.

Where English speakers slip

"oh-WAH-ree" glides the first vowel, stresses the middle, and substitutes an English r. Freeze the o, compress rather than protrude the lips for the w, and tap once. The final i should also be short — English "ree" is roughly twice its length.