Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "は" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce は in Japanese?

は is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /wa/. It means “topic marker (pronounced "wa").” Written with the kana for "ha" but pronounced "wa" — one short beat, always, when it marks the topic.

Written with the kana for "ha" but pronounced "wa" — one short beat, always, when it marks the topic.

は /wa/

A single mora glued to the preceding word. It carries no accent of its own, and because it typically follows the topic of the sentence, it often sits at the tail of a phrase-length pitch contour — inheriting whatever level that phrase ended on rather than adding anything new.

Listen: は

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Sound it out

wa The lips compress sideways rather than pushing forward the way they do for English w, then open to a bright short a. No h sound appears at any point, despite the spelling — this is one of Japanese's few genuine spelling irregularities, a fossil of an older pronunciation.

Hear it in a sentence

犬はソファで寝ています。

Inu wa sofa de nete imasu.

The dog is sleeping on the sofa.

Listen: 犬はソファで寝ています。

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犬はソファで寝ています puts は right after 犬, and the join is one continuous run: inu-wa, three morae with no pause. The sentence also has ソファ, a loanword whose fa mora doesn't exist in native Japanese vocabulary — worth noticing that it's a bilabial-ish f, not the teeth-on-lip f of English "sofa."

Where English speakers slip

The single biggest trap is reading it as "ha," which is what the kana says. It's "wa" whenever it functions as the topic particle. Beyond that, learners give it English function-word treatment — either stressing it for emphasis or swallowing it entirely. It should be one clear, short, unstressed beat, audibly present but never prominent.