Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "たくさん" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce たくさん in Japanese?

たくさん is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ta.kɯ̥.saɴ/. It means “a lot / many.” ta-ku-sa-n, four beats — the ku usually whispers and the closing n is a beat of its own.

ta-ku-sa-n, four beats — the ku usually whispers and the closing n is a beat of its own.

たくさん /ta.kɯ̥.saɴ/

takusan

Four slots, of which one is whispered and one has no vowel at all. English hears three syllables here and delivers three beats; Japanese measures four. The two beats English tends to skip are precisely the ones with the least audible content.

Listen: たくさん

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Sound it out

ta The tongue touches the upper teeth for the t, then a bright short a.

ku Quiet k, and then a u caught between two voiceless consonants — a textbook devoicing environment, so it often survives only as breath.

sa Crisp s into an a identical in quality to the first one.

n The moraic nasal, taking a full count. At the end of an utterance it's made far back with the mouth still open, closer to the ng of "song" than to a tongue-tip n.

Hear it in a sentence

昨日はたくさん食べました。

Kinou wa takusan tabemashita.

I ate a lot yesterday.

Listen: 昨日はたくさん食べました。

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昨日はたくさん食べました starts with 昨日 (ki-no-o), three morae with a long o at the end. So the sentence opens by asking you to hold a vowel and then immediately asks you to hold a nasal — two different kinds of extra duration, back to back, both of which English would compress.

Where English speakers slip

"tak-SAHN" in two syllables is the usual reduction: the ku swallowed entirely and the nasal treated as a closing consonant. Both are morae. Keep the ku as a whispered but timed beat, and hum the final ん for its own full count. The word should feel noticeably longer than English intuition suggests.