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Here's a pet peeve: studying Japanese pronunciation is difficult. As far as making yourself understood goes, Japanese is probably one of the easiest languages to pronounce. But as far as making yourself sound native-like goes, it's probably fairly difficult (though I'm sure nowhere near as hard as, say, any variety of Chinese, where making yourself understood is hard enough).
Here's the big problem: Japanese has something called "pitch accent" (not to be confused with accents as in regional accents; we're not talking about New York tough guy voices versus Texas drawls here). You see, English and Western European languages have what's called a stress accent, where stress is distinguished by a combination of various cues such as making certain syllables louder, changing their pitch, making them longer, etc. In Japanese, it's the same except pitch is the only distinction; it's debatable whether loudness plays any role, and length plays no role at all (vowel length in Japanese has an entirely different function; long vowels are considered completely different sounds than short ones).
Now where this is important is that many words or phrases have a "peak" (what we would call the "stress" except it's just pitch) where you must drop the pitch. If you're not at these peaks, you must not change the pitch much, generally only rising enough that you can drop the pitch again. I'm going to use an accent mark to show where peaks go (the pitch drops after the marked syllable)... a sentence like 僕は猫です ("I am a cat") would be read as bóku wa néko désu. (In this case the peaks happen to match the way we'd say it in English, but that's just a coincidence.) So far so good?
The rules can be pretty confusing. For example, 漢字 is pronounced "kanji" and means "Chinese character", referring to the 2000+ Chinese characters used to write Japanese (as well as the characters used in China, etc.). This word is pronounced with flat intonation, with no peak. So "kanji is difficult" would be 漢字は難しい = kanji wa muzukashíi. However, the word "kanji" does have a peak when it occurs in compounds like 常用漢字 ("daily use kanji"; a list of 1945 standard characters), which is pronounced "Jooyoo kánji" (where "oo" is a long "o", not "oo" as in "boot").
But that's not really the peeve part. The peeve part is this: nobody cares about the accents. The native writing system does not mark for them. Most bilingual dictionaries don't mark for them. Most textbooks don't mark for them. It makes it rather difficult to figure out how to learn them, and you need to learn them to sound at all like a native. I bought a Japanese TTS voice, but it's imperfect (as all TTS voices are), and even if it weren't, it's hard to figure it out by ear sometimes. I usually need to know the correct pitch beforehand to hear the peaks correctly. And that's fine since that's how natives talk, but that doesn't help me learn where they go.
I do have resources to look up the pronunciations of words, but they can't have everything and they don't always help very much for figuring out the pitches in phrases, conjugated verbs, etc...
- Kef
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