On page 82 and 83 of Japanese for Busy People II (third edition), there's the
following sentence (written mainly in kana with only a small amount of kanji)

ミルズ：ええ。じつはちょっとねつがあるんです。さっき薬を買ってきて飲んだんですが…。（ハクション）

And a definition of じつは as "actually". jisho.org's
[definition](http://jisho.org/word/%E5%AE%9F%E3%81%AF) only has notes of
"Expression, Adverb", though when I played the sound for it in an app called
"Shirabe jisho", it pronounced the は as a わ, presumably because is the
particle は.

Apart from playing the sound for a word, is there any way I could have looked
up whether the "は" was a particle "は" or not, either from a dictionary or
examining the grammar of the sentence?
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2018-03-30T04:09:37.453
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question
particle-は
How can I tell if a は is the particle は and therefore should be pronounced わ?
Only a few words contain "は pronounced wa" as part of their formal spelling,
so it's best to memorize them and get used to them.

  * こんにちは, こんばんは
  * ならでは
  * では, それでは, もしくは, あるいは, または
  * ※ 実は, 要は, 実際は, 本当は ...
  * ※ [願わくは, 望むらくは, 惜しむらくは](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/30245/5010) ...

Etymologically, all of these は are thematic-wa.

※: These are used like (sentence) adverbs, but they may or may not be single-
word expressions. Some dictionaries seem to treat these as lexicalized 副詞
(adverbs).
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2018-03-30T05:14:16.127
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5010
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answer