How to pronounce matcha, and the rest of the words

The autocomplete is a good record of where people get stuck. Type how to pronounce into a search box next to any of these words and it fills in usucha, koicha, tencha, uji, chawan. Those are not random. They are the words where the number of beats is not what an English speaker expects.

Matcha has three beats, not two. It is ma — a held stop — cha, and the middle beat is silence. English speakers say MATCH-uh, which loses that beat and then reduces the last vowel to almost nothing, so two things go wrong at once. Japanese has no stress accent to find: every beat is the same length, and once you count beats instead of hunting for the stressed syllable, most of these words come out right without being memorized.

The one rule that does the work

Japanese is counted in beats of equal length. A beat is one kana, and the writing makes this visible in a way that romanized spelling hides.

Matcha is written with three kana. The middle one is a small tsu, and it is not a sound — it is a held stop, a beat where the mouth is closed and nothing comes out. Say hot chocolate quickly and listen to the tiny gap after hot. That gap is the beat.

The other invisible beat is n. In chasen, the final n is not tacked onto the end of sen — it is its own beat, held about as long as the cha before it. Three beats: cha, se, n.

That is most of it. Count the kana, give each one the same length, and do not put a stress anywhere. An English speaker's instinct is to find the loud syllable and lean on it; here there is none to find, and adding one is what makes a word sound foreign in Japanese rather than merely accented.

The words, with the beats marked

Five vowels, and they never change

English vowels shift depending on the word around them. Japanese vowels do not. There are five, they are short, and they are the same every time.

• a as in father
• i as in machine
• u as in flute, but with the lips relaxed rather than pushed forward
• e as in bed
• o as in more

This is why the final a in matcha is a full ah and not the uh at the end of sofa. Reducing unstressed vowels is an English habit, and Japanese has no unstressed vowels to reduce.

There is one exception worth knowing, because it explains two words in the table. When u or i falls between two voiceless consonants, or at the end of a word after one, it is often devoiced — the mouth makes the shape but the voice does not join in. That is why chashaku sounds like chashak with a breath at the end rather than chashakoo, and why the su in usucha almost disappears into a whisper. The beat is still there. The voicing is not.

What I would fix first

If you change one thing, change the beat in matcha, and let the vowels follow later. Timing is what carries recognition in Japanese — a word with the right number of beats and imperfect vowels will be understood, and a word with beautiful vowels and a missing beat often will not. Mah-chah said evenly, with a held gap in the middle, is already most of the way there.

The second thing, if you want one: stop saying koy. Koicha is ko and then i, two separate beats that happen to sit next to each other, and English merges them into a diphthong by reflex. The same reflex turns na-o-shi into now-shi in kusenaoshi, the tool that reshapes a whisk. Five beats: ku, se, na, o, shi.

Questions I get asked

How do you pronounce matcha?

Three beats: mah, a small held gap, then chah. Both a vowels are the full ah of father, and neither is louder than the other. The common English version, MATCH-uh, drops the middle beat and weakens the last vowel. Say it evenly and the gap does the work. The names of the practice itself, chanoyu and sadō, are explained in what the Japanese tea ceremony is called.

Is it matcha or maccha?

The word is the same; only the romanization differs. Written in Japanese it is three kana, with a small tsu in the middle marking the held beat. Some systems write that beat by doubling the following consonant, which gives maccha, and the Hepburn system gives matcha. Matcha is the spelling in normal English use.

How do you pronounce usucha and koicha?

Usucha is three beats, u-su-cha, and the su is usually devoiced, so it lands close to oo-s-chah. Koicha is also three, ko-i-cha, and the point to hold onto is that ko and i are separate beats rather than the single koy sound English wants to make of them.

How do you pronounce Uji?

Two beats, oo-jee. The u is the vowel in flute with relaxed lips, not a y sound, so it is never yoo-jee. It is the region south of Kyoto where a great deal of the best tencha is grown.

Is tencha the same as sencha?

No, and the pronunciation makes them look closer than they are. Tencha is te-n-cha, the shaded leaf that is dried without rolling and then ground into matcha. Sencha is a different tea entirely, rolled and brewed as leaf. If a shop describes matcha as ground sencha, that is a reason for caution.

Does the pitch matter?

Japanese does use pitch to distinguish some words, but for these it is not what makes you understood, and the patterns vary between speakers and regions enough that a chart would give you false confidence. Get the number of beats right and keep them even. That carries almost all of the recognition.

Where this fits

If the words themselves are new, the beginner's guide is the place to start, and usucha and koicha explains what the two teas actually are rather than only how to say them. If you are about to sit in a tea room, what a guest actually says comes down to four short phrases. The natsume and the Takayama chasen have their own articles. The objects in the table are real ones I stock: the whisk, the bowl, the scoop, the caddy and the sifter.

Written by Mio.K, who chooses everything in this shop by hand in Japan.