I bet many times you have seen Japanese words or place names with the letter F, and many times people pronounce it as the F sound in English. No idea why the government decided to use the letter F for that particular sound, but the truth is, there is no F sound in the Japanese language.
Pronouncing F in Japanese
When you see the words like Fukushima, Fukuoka or furikake and pronounce those names with the English F sound, people would understand you. However, that makes you sound totally “a foreigner”. If you want to become more hip and more native-like, I recommend you should use the following way.
Think of when you blow off the candles on a birthday cake. You make your lips round and exhale, right? Make that lip shape and say “hu”! That’s more like the sound Japanese would make. It’s more similar to H sound, rather than F sound. So Fukushima is more like Hukushima. Mt. Fuji (Japanese call it Fuji-san) is more like Mt. Huji, or Huji san.
The reason the government used F instead H is probably (I might be wrong) that they considered of the people who speaks languages with silent H sound, such as French or Italian. However, if you are an English speaker, replacing F with H works.
Pronouncing R in Japanese
Another troublesome pronunciation is the R letter. You probably have heard of that the Japanese speakers cannot make differences between L and R, and that’s totally true.
When you see R letters in a Japanese word, that R is more like “D” sound or “L” sound. Technically speaking, the Japanese “R” is the exactly same sounds as the “flap” sound in American English. Think of the sound of the “tt” part or “dd” part of the words such as “better”, “butter”, “ladder”, etc. in American English, that’s the Japanese R sound! For most people, it should sounds close to “D” sound.
But it is actually difficult to extract those “tt” or “dd” sound and apply it to a Japanese word, especially because it’s not really a D sound! If it’s very hard for you, it’s much closer to pronounce “L” sound, instead of “R” sound, if you didn’t want to sound totally foreign. So when you say “Thank you” in Japanese, don’t say “ah-ree-gah-tow!” but more like “ah-lee-gah-toh!”
If you change these sounds as recommended, your pronunciation will become much better and you won’t sound as foreign as before. One more important thing to make people understand your Japanese is to speak loud enough and clearly! Most of the time, people are too shy to speak foreign language feeling it’s embarrassing to make mistakes, but talking with confidence is the most important thing. Good luck!
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