Japanese Dialects

[thomas]

If you are interested in Japanese dialects, please visit Kazuhide Yamamoto's web site

=> http://hougen.japanref.com (in Japanese and English)

Dr. Yamamoto works at the ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories in Kyoto. His site (which we're proud to host since a few days) lists resources related to local dialects.

[moyashi]

hehe ... some are sooo diffenrent than standard Japanese that you can't even really understand what they're saying.

Yamamoto-ban is said to sound the most like English.
I like the hard Osaka-ban dialect.
Sapporo is pretty close to the standard pronunication.
Standard pronunciation would be what the TV announcers of NHK speak.

Definitely something fn to learn. When I was still able to sound like a person from Osaka I was accused of being a half breed "half". LOL ... Blond hair and Blue eyes but still many folks insisted that I was either half or my father married a Japanese lady for his second wife. lolololol ... and I had only lived in Osaka for 3 months way back when.

Cheers and make sure you have fun. This part of Japanese I find extremely interesting.

[samuraitora]

thanks for the link

[thomas]

Originally posted by moyashi
hehe ... some are sooo diffenrent than standard Japanese that you can't even really understand what they're saying.
Sorry for replying so late, but that's absolutely true. Even though my wife was born and raised in the Tohoku area, she has troubles understanding local folks after having lived in Tokyo for about ten years. She always jokes she'd need a interpreter to understand some members of her own family.

The same applies to German. Some Austrian, Swiss or East German dialects sound just too funny.
;)

[moyashi]

Can you write Shiragana?

lololo ... It took me a while to understand what that ojisan was asking me :)

[Microage97]

Yes, My wife can't understand some delicts. It is weird but she also feels bad when people from Tokyo talk to her. I think it has something to do with not being the same as her. What do you all think?

[thomas]

Hard to say, I don't know too much about regional resentments among Japanese. Probably in Japan it's still more important where you graduated from than where you actually come from.

[moyashi]

universitites, schools, companies have some what importance.

Definitely in Hoshu (the main island) if you're not in Tokyo you are a certified country bumpkin or potato boy.

Osaka folks pee on that mentality and Us up in Hokkaido just laugh at the whole Honshu mentality.

[lexico]

Hi, Thomas, again!
I'd like to see the site, but the link is gone.
Where can I find it now?

[Glenn]

Again, old thread. The page probably doesn't exist anymore.

[lexico]

Here's another site by Daniel Long Percieved Dialect Maps of Japan and Korea (http://nihongo.human.metro-u.ac.jp/long/maps/perceptmaps.htm)

Dr. Kazuhide Yamamoto at the ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories in Kyoto still runs the web site but he seems to have disontinuted offering his resources related to local dialects.

If you are interested in Natural Language Processing, Corpus Linguistics, or Machine Translation, see his website Spoken Language Translation Research Labs (http://www.slt.atr.jp/)