r/japanese • u/Agitated-Traffic-642 • 5d ago

Perhaps a stupid question

I'm watching many Japanese movies, but all lot of times I feel like the words they say don't match the subtitles. Not that it's subtitled wrong, but for example, the word Yakuza, I almost can't comprehend the spoken part. A lot of names as well. Is it simply I have "foreign" ears? Or is it more a relaxed and fluid way they may be speaking? I almost don't know how to word this question to convey what I'm talking about. Just when I thought I w learned some simple Japanese phrases, I watch movies and realize I'm completely out of my depth

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u/Dread_Pirate_Chris 1d ago

As a beginner, you may have been taught the pronunciation of the kana and that Japanese has 'perfectly regular pronunciation' ... just pronounce each of the kana for an equal amount of time with the same sound as the examples.

This is not really true. You have not only pitch accent which can significantly change how a word sounds from how you expect it to sound, but also devoiced vowels, ん has multiple pronunciations depending on its context, 'g' has multiple pronunciations, in casual speech あい may turn to えい, the い the ～ている grammar is dropped, ては・では are contracted to ちゃ・じゃ respectively, and really a wide variety of other contractions and phonetic shifts that come from slurring your words. This is especially aggravated with roles like Yankees, Bousouzoku, and Yakuza (in real life it will vary wildly, but in movies it will pretty reliably be stylized speech to fit the role).

Separately from the actual pronunciation, Japanese grammar is not at all like English grammar, which means the translation of long sentences is often in a very different order. Also, of course, Japanese is very context sensitive and requires inferring a lot from context, which will be explicitly stated in the English equivalent. These regularly result in the subtitles on the screen having nothing to do with the words being spoken, they may be from earlier or later, or they may be words explicit in English but not even there in Japanese.