I've been teaching ESL for over 30 years, but for the last three I've had
almost exclusively Japanese students (I teach mostly 1-on-1 classes over
Skype, to students from High School to Business Executives.) I'm also a
professional linguist and somewhat of a hyperglot, but very much still a
dilettante when it comes to Japanese. My question is this:

Is there any way using _kana_ to represent the unpalatalized /s/ before /i/ or
/ɪ/? When Japanese students read /si/, most of them invariably pronounce /ʃi/
because... well, you know why. I have many workarounds and ways of
demonstrating the difference, but I thought it might be a truckload easier if
there were a way of demonstrating this unequivocally so that when they saw it,
the light would go on immediately.

事前にありがとうございます!
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2013-09-09T07:43:37.747
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2013-09-10T03:19:04.977
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pronunciation phonetics
Teaching the difference between "see" and "she" in English
"she" と "see" の発音が違うということが、日本人にはわからないので、書き分ける方法はありません。  
"シ" が "see" ではなく、"she" になるのは、palatalization という現象です。  
palatalization は、日本語においては、「イ」を発音するときの口の形に近くなる、ということです。  
「シー」「シィ」「スィ」「セィ」の中で、一番 palatalization が起こっていないのは「スィ」だと思います。
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2013-09-09T07:50:10.650
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2013-09-09T08:13:35.113
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> Is there any way using kana to represent the unpalatalized /s/ before /i/ or
> /ɪ/?

No, there isn't.
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2013-09-09T11:01:56.650
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Not perfect but you could point out that in "see" the S sound is very similar
to the S sound in さ [sa] but different from the S sound in しゃ [sha] or し
[shi], and that the EE sound is very similar to the Japanese い [i]. That's how
I have introduced it to students in the past. They almost certainly would have
never noticed that the beginning S sound of し [shi] is different to the other
sounds in the "S" row (さ・す・せ・そ [sa][su][se][so]).

Try and show them the comparison of these two sets of Japanese syllables:

(さ・しゃ) (す・しゅ) (そ・しょ)

They should then be able to distinguish the different "types" of S.
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2013-09-10T03:19:04.977
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