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My first question is about the rules of pronunciation of the letter "H".

Some people pronounce the "H" as if it were "Sh". For example, "Shijutsu"
instead of "Hijutsu", or "Shiyori" instead of "Hiyori".

Is there any rule about it? Or is it just a matter of regional accent where
some southern Japanese people pronounce the "H" as "Sh"? Or maybe, the older
you get, the more you accentuate the letters.
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pronunciation phonology phonetics
Why the "H" is pronounced as "Sh" in some cases?
Your first assumption is correct, it is a matter of accent.

Consider the mouth shape and action required to form the sound for ひ (hi). By
tightening and pressing the tongue closer to the roof of your mouth, the air
rushes across your tongue and hits the back of your front teeth creating the
SHHH sound.

Also consider that in the native Japanese phonology し is SI or SHI depending
on dialect and even mood. As there is no distinction between the two, it is no
surprise that a similarly formed phoneme suffers the same speaker bias / side
effects.

At least, this has always been my observation over the last 16 years.
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The sound you hear in HI is not really a "sh" (as the English "sh"), but
neither is the sound SHI an "sh". While it's very easy to learn to pronounce
Japanese sufficiently, Japanese pronunciation does have its quirks, and you
have to get used to it. The "sh" situation (or fricative situation, as we'd
call it in linguistics lingo) is one of them.

Let's first consider the sounds in hand. SHI and HI are both just romanized
transcription of the Japanese hiragana letters し and ひ. These letters (like
most kana letters) represent a combination of a consonant (//h// or //s//) and
a vowel (//i//), but in Japanese, some of these consonant+vowel combinations
can make the consonant sound change drastically. We usually see it in the
common transcription system (Hepburn), so when we combine //h// and //u// we
get FU (ふ) and when we combine //s// and //i// we get SHI (し). But in the case
of //h//, although the pronunciation changes (and it changes _for everyone_ in
the standard dialect — you just don't always get to hear it), the
transcription system falls short of representing that change.

Now let's look at the combination //s// + //i//: the vowel //i// causes a
sound change that belong a very common class of sound changes called
[palatalization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization). These changes
usually happen before front vowels (such as //e// or //i//) and this is the
origin of the "soft" C and G in English that usually come before an E or an I
(this palatalization originally occurred in Latin, so it has equivalent in
most European languages since they've all borrowed stuff from Latin, or are
direct descendants of it).

In Japanese, the palatalization we speak about occurs before //i// and //j//
(not before //e//). //j// here means the consonant that's usually
transliterated as Y (since it sounds like "y" in English), in combinations
such as RYO (りょ). When this consonant is combined with //s// we usually
transliterate it as sh, so しゃ (//s// + //j// + //a//) is transliterated SHA,
although you sometimes always find the transliteration SYA.

So how does this changed pronunciation really sounds? To the ears of an
English speaker (or most Westerners) this usually sounds exactly like the
English "sh" — but it is not. [The sound of the English
"sh"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_sibilant) is
pronounced with the tip of the tongue behind the teeth, but pointing toward
the palate (the roof of the mouth), while [the Japanese
SH](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_sibilant) is
pronounced somewhat similarly, but the tip of the tongue is not pointing up,
and the "sh"-like sound is actually produced by the having back of the tongue
raised against the palate. These sounds _are_ different, and some languages
may distinguish between them. As it happens with English in Japanese though,
it doesn't matter, and we'd just perceive the first one as "English accent"
and the second as "Japanese accent". Linguists mark the first (English) sound
as [ʃ] and the second (Japanese) sound as [ɕ].

With that settled, we can move to what happens with HI. In essence, it's very
similar to SHI — we also have palatalization that happens in the same way (so
it also occurs in HYA, HYO and HYU, although it is not reflected in the
transcription), but //h// is palatalized to something slightly different. This
consonant is called [palatal
fricative](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal_fricative), and it's
theoretically simpler to pronounce — you just raise your back of the tongue
against the palate (you don't do anything with the tip, as opposed to the
Japanese SH). This sounds a lot like a softer, more fluid version of "h".

Learning to differentiate between all these sounds takes practice, but I
suggest listening to the recordings at the Wikipedia articles and trying to
see the difference yourself. The articles themselves are highly technical, but
they also contain a list of examples from other languages where you may find
these sounds.
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Easiest example: Tokyo dialect. They often pronounce 人 as しと, with a very
short i, more like "shto" than "shito".

It's just a matter of pronunciation in different dialects.

Other examples would be う which is somewhere between "u" and the German "ü",
depending on the person.
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I think I can really help you here with pronouncing these sounds correctly.
You heard of IPA? It's a phonetic language to represent most of the sounds of
the languages of the world. Each symbol represents a completely separate
sound. I won't show you the IPA symbols, but they're on wikipedia for any
language you want to learn with audio examples and everything.

The "sh" in English "shoe", the "sh" in Japanese "shi", the "h" in Japanese
"ohayo", and the "h" in Japanese "hito" are ALL different phonemes. Formants
are what make different vowels and consonants sounds separate to listeners.
Formants are like extra pitches layered on top of the fundamental pitch of a
sound. For human speaking, there are about 3 important formants that help
distinguish our vocal sounds, but I won't get into that. I'll just tell you
that changing the position of the tongue and lips changes the shape of the
oral cavity so that sound resonates differently, with different formants even
on the same fundamental pitch or "note".

For "shoe" and "shi". Hold the "sh" sound for "shoe", and just slightly raise
the middle of your tongue relative to the tip. A formant will raise in pitch,
and you'll be pronouncing Japanese "sh" as in "shi". It'll feel further back
in your mouth than English sh, and have a higher pitched "hiss". Also, your
embouchure will widen to accommodate your raised flattened tongue as it
uncurls. It'll feel as though you're almost smiling instead of pouting out
your lips like with English "sh".

Now, raise the back of your tongue on that same "shh" sound instead of the
middle. The sound should have an even higher hiss now. The sound will be
coming from nearer to where your English 'h' originates. This sound is the
Japanese "h" from "hito". Not really a "sh" or an "h" sound to me, more like a
cross between "h" and "y" like the "hy" from "hue".

Guess what? If you can make this sound you can say "ich" in German! "Ch" in
German has two sounds. The more guttural one that's in common with Scottish
"loch" is in words like "macht" and "Woche". Many English people have no
problem making this sound, albeit they usually say it too harshly and hold it
too long. However, being a German allophone with the other pronunciation,
English people aren't told by Germans that the sound in "ich" and "sprechen"
isn't the same as "macht". That sound is the one you made for Japanese "hito".
If you can say "ich", you can say "hito" and vice versa.

Put a "t" sound before the Japanese "shi" "sh" sound like "tsh" and you have
the real Japanese "ch" sound like in "chizu".

Hope this helped! If you have any questions, just ask (:
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This question has a useful answer by Boaz Yaniv which points out that you may
simply be mishearing ひ as し, but it misses the fact that some speakers
actually _do_ pronounce these the same way! This merger is mentioned briefly
in [_The Phonology of Japanese_ , Labrune 2012,
p.69](http://books.google.com/books?id=ix9r6CbEl6IC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&ei=4eQ-
VMeDF4GqogSnk4CwCQ&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage):

> For certain speakers, the opposition between /h/ and /s/ is neutralized
> before _i_ : _hi_ /hi/ and _shi_ /si/ are pronounced identically. The
> opposition is neutralized to the benefit of /h/ in the Kansai area (/hi/,
> /si/ = [hi]), to the benefit of /s/ in the Kantō area (/hi/, /si/ = [çi] or
> [ɕi]), as shown below. These mergers were already attested at the beginning
> of the eighteenth century.
```

>                          Kansai           Kantō
>       _shima_ /sima/       [hima]       [çima] / [ɕima]       _'island'_
>       _hima_ /hima/        [hima]       [çima] / [ɕima]       _'(free)
> time'_
>  
```

So you're right, ひ is sometimes pronounced like し or vice versa, depending on
both regional accent and the individual speaker. [You may hear 東 pronounced
like しがし rather than ひがし in Shitamachi, for
example.](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F%E6%88%B8%E8%A8%80%E8%91%89#.E9.9F.B3.E9.9F.BB)

Although at the moment only a minority of speakers have this merger, it's
possible that in a few hundred years most speakers will treat し and ひ as the
same thing, [like what happened with the じ・ぢ or ず・づ pairs
historically](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%9B%E3%81%A4%E4%BB%AE%E5%90%8D#.E6.AD.B4.E5.8F.B2).
It's also possible that this may never happen―language change is hard to
predict!

Regardless, you should be careful to distinguish these sounds in your own
speech; all you need to do as a learner is be aware of how other people talk
so you can understand what they're saying.
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just chiming in to say the word that nobody hasn't so far:
[sibilants](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibilant).

sibilants are fricatives with a greater proportion of energy in the higher
frequencies. in English, we have at least [s, ʃ, z, ʒ] for sibilant and [f, v,
θ, ð ] for non-sibilant fricatives; think of sibilants as 'S-sounds', and the
distinction should be clear.

the important thing about the /sima/—/hima/ [ɕima]–[çima] distinction (for
those who observe it) is that the /s/ phoneme retains sibilance throughout its
allophones [s, ɕ], whereas /h/ retains non-sibilance throughout its allophones
[h, ç, ϕ].
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