How to pronounce 'rya', 'ryo', ryu'

[istephenyu8790]

These are standard morae characters, so they have equal length in duration as other characters. But I can't really seem to get what is going on. Other similar characters like 'bya','pya' are really easy, but these three take on a new level. Moreover, its really hard to detect it in listening.

I learned how to pronounce my 'r''s. Now I need to know what is going on with these rya, ryo ryu

[mmmason8967]

I found the 'ry' sounds very difficult too. They're much, much easier if you abandon all efforts to use R and say them with L instead. Once you can pronounce them as LYA, LYO and LYU, you can trying slowly moving back to the R sound.

マイケル

[istephenyu8790]

Thanks again for your input mason.

I think it would be much easier to see how a native speaker says it. As in watching a video of them saying it, observing how their mouth moves. **hint site improvement

[team.relationships]

Hi マイケル and istephenyu8790,

To pronounce these sounds, I tend to "roll" my "R" and manage to get the right sound between "R" and "L". I'm not sure this can be shown in a video, but I forward your idea to the correspondent team and see what's possible!

Thank you!

Mélanie
Team JapanesePod101.com

[istephenyu8790]

I have a strategy but I don't know if its right.

I'm trying 'dya,'dyo', 'dyu' cause those seem pretty easy.
I understand that making the 'd' sound is very similar to making 'r' sound.

So now after some of that, i'm attempting 'rya', 'ryo', 'ryu'.
It sounds different from my 'ra','ro','ru' , i can say that for sure.

[community.japanese]

istephenyu8790-san,
I think you can start from dya, dyu and dyo

If you could try also "ri-ya" slowly first and accelerate it gradually, you could sound "rya" better.
Or alternatively, you can "try" trilling/rolling your tongue, and then just say "ya" (same applies to "ya" and "yo"
to make "ryu" and "ryo"). This works because, when you try to pronounce "ya", your rolling tongue
gives proper "R" Of course, Japanese R is not rolling sound, but it'd help you definitely.

Natsuko(奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com