Sound Changes

Back in this post we talked about sokuon.

What Is It?

Rendaku is when the second word in a word pair changes its pronunciation. It will always add dakuten or han-dakuten.

1) K→G Examples

手紙、革靴、犬嫌い、内輪喧嘩、中国

2) S→Z Examples

山桜、酒好き、青写真、名台詞、青空

3) T→D Examples

鼻血、揚げ豆腐、赤玉、酒造り

4) H→B Examples

過払い、座布団、花火、梅干し

5) H→P Examples

出発、鉛筆

Rendaku Don’t Work For Me, Brother

Now that you have some common examples of words with rendaku, here is an interesting fact: Some Kanji (for some reason) simply do not change their sounds. Even if they are the 2nd Kanji in a compound word, they won’t change.

Kanji That LOVE Rendaku

On the other hand, there are some Kanji that ALWAYS change their sound because of rendaku. Here are some examples:

Kanji That Resist Rendaku

Finally there are some Kanji that do rendaku, but it is rare.

Working Backwards

Unfortunately, rendaku isn’t predictable.

Let’s take the word for “letter” for example. If you heard the word てがみ theoretically, you could figure out that the て is the the Kanji 手. Then you might wonder, “ What is the Kanji for the word がみ? I’ve never heard of がみ before.” If you have knowledge of rendaku, you might be able to work out that がみ is actually かみ. That makes sense because かみ is 紙 which means “paper”.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, there is no formula or rule to rendaku. There are tendencies and things like that, but there’s no way to predict rendaku. You just have to hear words, and then realize what is going on.