More on Japanese Sounds – The Problem of が/ぎ/ぐ/げ/ご

It’s been a while! University’s been a killer this term – I’m in my final year and it’s tough, man! Although I continued to study Japanese alongside work for the first half of the term, my brain has been too tired recently to even contemplate learning new vocab/grammar/etc. But because it’s Christmas, and because I have no summative work due at the end of this term (read: at the end of this week, because oh yes, my friends, the end of term is nearly upon us!), I haven’t wanted to work and have been doing more Japanese.

There were a couple of things I was considering writing on, but I decided to go with this topic because I’ve been noticing it more, and more frequently too.

So, the Japanese が/ぎ/ぐ/げ/ご. I’ve written about the l/r sound in Japanese (らりるれろ), because it’s probably the most discussed of the sounds. It’s the most obvious one that doesn’t fit within the English sound system. Less obvious is がぎぐげご, or “ga”, “gi”, “gu”, “ge” and “go”, because it sounds pretty darn close to our own “g” sound.

Imagine my confusion, then, when I stared to hear random ん sounds popping up in words which they had no place in! For example, in the first recording on this page, when the lady says 英語（えいご）she adds a slight “n” sound to the 語（ご）. Where was this ん sound coming from??? After it happened a couple of times, I noticed that it only appeared before がぎぐげご sounds, and if you’ve ever tried to put a bit of ん before a “g” you’ll notice that it’s not that hard.

Further research (read: searching the internet) revealed that this wasn’t such an uncommon problem, and yet there is hardly anything written on blogs or Japanese learning sites about it (it’s confined mainly to forums and Q&A sites).

There are some general rules which I’ve formulated about this amalgamation of ん and the がぎぐげご sounds:

• The ん+ “g” sound is not a “corruption”: it’s not a corruption because the alphabet letter “g” is only a rough approximation of the “g” sound in がぎぐげご. This might be difficult to wrap your head around, but basically “ga” is NOT the same as が. Native Japanese speakers will hear が differently than we hear it.
• The ん+ “g” sound is not two separate sounds: I have found it helpful to try and think of the ん + “g” sound as one thing, so “nga”, “ngi”, “ngu”, “nge” and “ngo” rather than as んが/んぎ/んぐ/んげ/んご. Furhter, the “n” part belongs to the “g” sound, rather than finishing off the sound before it. For example: しごと (shigoto) can sometimes be heard as し（ん）ごと (shingoto), but this ん sound before the ご is part of the ご rather than the し. So if we split it down, it looks like し・んごと rather than しん・ごと.
• The ん+ “g” sound only occurs when the がぎぐげご sound is in the middle/end of the word (not the beginning) and also the particle が: The ん＋がぎぐげご sound only appears when the がぎぐげご sound is in the middle or end of the word. It never occurs at the beginning. It can, however, be heard when pronouncing the particle が.
• Some people may say the ん+ “g” sound, other’s may say the “g” only sound: this is the irritating one. In some cases you may hear an ん sound preceding がぎぐげご and for the same word in other cases, it may not appear. I don’t think this is a big issue, it’s just something to be aware of.

Because of the variability in whether people sound an “n” before the “g”, I have found it doesn’t really matter, although it can make it easier to pronounce words if you add in a slight “n” sound. It’s something to look out for if you’re practising your speaking abilities by repeating after a recording and you can’t get it to sound quite like it does in the recording, it’s quite possibly because there’s an added “n” sound.

Have fun listening!