maybe it’s just me but does the audio sound more like「私は彼に"視聴"した」 rather than 「私は彼に主張した」to anyone else?
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I cannot hear the original audio, but I tried pasting the sentence to google translate and made it read it.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind:
Japanese “u” sound is somewhere between an Italian or Spanish u and an i. I think there may be some variation between speakers, but in general, the shape of the lips is not a circle, but an horizontal slot when pronouncing Japanese う.
The other component, is that it is often mute/almost mute, so there may be little difference between “shichou” and “shuchou”, as they both may end up being pronounced “sh’chou”.
I can, kind of, notice a small difference in how Google translate pronounces the two sentences. But I have to be quite attentive to do so. I think with time, and better knowledge of the vocabulary, the situation will improve.
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thanks for the reply, mike-lima.
when listening to the google translate version of both sentences, I can hear the う sound in 主張 (most of the times…). when I listened to the 17 cloze exercises for the word 主張 I could hardly hear the う sound in them; when I think I hear the う I think it was me “projecting/extending” a preceding お sound, e.g. と主張〇〇.
I think devoicing would explain the issue I have telling the two apart. both 主張 and 視聴 get devoiced to “sh’chou” and as they both also have the same pitch pattern (you can check that with prosody tutor suzuki-kun), they pretty much sound the same. in which case, the context is needed to figure out which word is being used
P.S. for people that want to learn more about devoicing, check out dogen’s youtube video on devoicing
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