How to Pronounce '美しい': Japanese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce 美しい in Japanese?

美しい is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ɯ̥.tsɯ̥.kɯ.ɕiː/. It means “beautiful.” u-tsu-ku-shi-i, five beats — the first three vowels tend to whisper away and the last is held long.

How do you pronounce "美しい" in Japanese?

u-tsu-ku-shi-i, five beats — the first three vowels tend to whisper away and the last is held long.

美しい /ɯ̥.tsɯ̥.kɯ.ɕiː/

utsukushii

Five morae, of which the last two are a single sustained vowel and the first two or three are typically voiceless. The word is a striking illustration of how much of Japanese timing is invisible: a native speaker's 美しい has a whispered front half and a ringing long back half, but every beat is equally long.

Listen: 美しい

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Sound it out

u An unrounded u opening the word, and immediately a devoicing candidate before the voiceless affricate that follows. Expect it to be barely audible.

tsu The affricate as a single gesture, with another devoicing-prone u after it. Two whispered morae in a row makes the start of this word genuinely hard to hear.

ku The k is gently released. This u sits before a voiceless sh, so it too can lose its voicing, though many speakers keep it.

shii A thin palatal hiss followed by an i held for two full morae. After three whispered beats, this is where the word finally becomes clearly audible — and it must be genuinely long.

Hear it in a sentence

今日は景色が美しいですね。

Kyou wa keshiki ga utsukushii desu ne.

What a beautiful view today!

Listen: 今日は景色が美しいですね。

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

今日は景色が美しいですね ends with ですね, adding a devoiced su and a short ね. 景色 (ke-shi-ki) in the middle has a shi and a ki that both tend to devoice — so by the time you reach 美しい, the sentence has already been dropping voicing all over the place. The long i at the end is the one thing that must ring out.

Where English speakers slip

Beginners say "oo-tsoo-koo-SHEE" — four rounded, fully voiced beats with stress at the end and a short final vowel. Nearly everything needs changing: unround the u's, let the first two or three go voiceless, level the emphasis, and then hold that final i for a genuine two counts. It's the longest-feeling part of the word, and learners consistently make it the shortest.