Small But Matters : A tip for improving your Japanese Pronunciation

｢ちょっと まって！」(Wait a minute!)
[00:07]
みなさん、こんにちは。(Hello everyone.)にほんごのpronunciation、どうですか。It’s not that difficult than what you imagined, is it?  But maybe you want to improve your pronunciation a little bit, I guess.
[00:23]
One of the typical pronunciations that doesn’t sound like a native speaker is when the word has a small tsuつ, such as “itta(いった)” or ”katta(かった)”.
[00:36] 
For example, listen to this; “choto mate kudasai (= Wait a minute!)”.  hmm…. Ok, almost….
[00:43]
When there is a small “っ”tsu, you can think of it like a pause or a jump to the next word. It is small but counts as one mora (sound), that means this silence has the same length as the other sounds.
[01:01]Therefore, it should be, “chotto matte kudasai” ; compare to  “choto mate kudasai”.  Do you see the difference?
[01:11]I often demonstrate this using musical symbols.
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By the way, I'm also working on my English pronunciation! (*´∀｀)

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Note: English translations might sound occasionally unnatural as English, as I try to preserve the structure and essence of the original Japanese. I hope it also helps you to capture the pattern of the sentence structure.

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