Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "大切" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 大切 in Japanese?

大切 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ta.i.se.tsɯ̥/. It means “important / precious.” ta-i-se-tsu, four beats — the ta and i are separate, and the tsu is one affricate.

ta-i-se-tsu, four beats — the ta and i are separate, and the tsu is one affricate.

大切 /ta.i.se.tsɯ̥/

taisetsu

Four units of the same length, with the crest on se. Two of those four beats are things English mishandles — a bare vowel that gets absorbed and an affricate whose final vowel gets either split off or over-voiced — so hitting four honest counts here is a real test.

Listen: 大切

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

Sound it out

ta Dental t with a quiet release into a short bright a.

i Here the mora is a lone vowel. English fuses this with the preceding a into the vowel of "tie" — Japanese keeps two beats.

se A clean s into a fixed front e that doesn't glide toward "say."

tsu A single affricate, and at the end of the word its u devoices, so the beat comes out as little more than a prolonged "ts."

Hear it in a sentence

今日は大切な日です。

Kyou wa taisetsu na hi desu.

It's an important day.

Listen: 今日は大切な日です。

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

今日は大切な日です ends with 日 read as "hi" — a single mora with a palatal h, quite different from the same kanji read as "nichi" or "ka" in other words. Between 大切 and 日です, the sentence closes on three consecutive short beats with a devoiced su at the very end.

Where English speakers slip

"TIE-set-soo" is the composite error: the first two morae fused into an English diphthong, a stressed second syllable, a split affricate and a rounded final vowel. Pull the a and i apart, level the beats, keep the tsu as one gesture, and let its vowel go voiceless with the lips flat.