Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:54:18 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
><grammatim@...> wrote:
>
>
>>Japanese phonetics sometimes don't sound much like what you'd expect
>>from the phonemic transcriptions.
>>
>>
>
>One simple example: It seems that their "u" is much like the German
>u-umlaut.
>
>

I find it more an unrounded back vowel than a rounded front vowel (which
is what u-umlaut is).

~mark