The Three Hardest Japanese Sounds: ふ, つ, and う
Most Japanese sounds give learners no trouble at all. Three do: ふ, つ, and う. Part of the problem is the romaji itself. Spelling them fu, tsu, and u points your mouth at the English sounds, which are close enough to fool you and wrong enough to give you an accent. Here’s what they really are.
ふ — Not an English F
English f presses your top teeth against your bottom lip. Japanese ふ never touches the teeth. Both lips come close together and you blow gently, the way you’d blow out a candle. Linguists call it a voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ], but “soft puff between the lips” is all you need.
Try it on 富士山 (ふじさん). That ふ should sound closer to an English “h-w” blend than a hard “f”.
つ — The ts Cluster
つ fuses “t” and “s” into one sound [ts]. English speakers already make it, just at the end of words: “cats”, “boots”. What English almost never does is put it at the front, and that front position is the whole difficulty.
So borrow it from where you already have it. Say “boots”, hold the “ts” at the end, then stick う on it. A few words to drill once it clicks: 月 (つき), 机 (つくえ), 続く (つづく).
う — Unrounded
English “oo” in “food” rounds the lips and pushes them forward. Japanese う keeps them relaxed and flat, a compressed, unrounded [ɯ]. That tight little circle English speakers make is one of the first things that gives away a foreign accent.
Aim for the neutral lips of a quiet “uh”, just pulled higher and further back. This, plus the devoicing in the next article, is exactly why 好き comes out as “ski” and not “soo-kee”.
A Physical Check for Each
For ふ, hold a strip of paper an inch from your lips and say 富士 slowly. A correct bilabial ふ moves the paper with a soft, even puff. An English-style f, made with teeth on lip, tends to produce a thinner, more concentrated stream that hits a smaller spot on the paper.
For う, watch your lips in a mirror while you say 靴 (くつ). If your lips visibly push forward into a small circle at any point, you are rounding them the English way. Correct う keeps the lips level with the corners of your mouth, closer to a resting position than a shape you are actively making.
Why These Three Specifically
Most Japanese consonants and vowels have a close enough cousin in English, or in Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Mongolian, that learners reproduce them correctly within days without ever being taught the mouth position explicitly. These three do not, because the romaji spelling actively points you toward a different, more familiar sound: the letter f, the letters ts, and the letter u all already mean something specific in the Latin alphabet, and that meaning is close enough to fool you.
That is also why these three sounds resist self-correction longer than sounds that are simply unfamiliar. An unfamiliar sound gets your full attention. A slightly-wrong-but-close sound does not, because it is intelligible and nobody corrects you on it in casual conversation.
How to Practice
- ふ: blow a candle, add voice. No teeth.
- つ: borrow the “ts” from English “cats”, move it to the front.
- う: keep lips flat and relaxed; never round them.
- Record yourself and compare to native audio. These three sounds are where a tiny fix makes the biggest difference.
Teacher's Note
With these three, stop trusting the spelling. “Fu, tsu, u” are the nearest letters the alphabet could offer, not a set of instructions. Learn them by ear early and you’ll skip an accent that’s genuinely hard to undo once it sets in. I’ve watched plenty of advanced students still fighting a rounded う years later.
Train your ear and mouth together
Nihongo Pass pairs every word with native audio, so the tricky sounds become muscle memory.