Long vowels have a very subtle pronunciation difference between regular vowels. The example used in the online text is こういち, which is also Koichi, who is the creator(?) of TextFugu and Wanikani.
The small tsu is used when there’s a double consonant and is placed in front of the consonant that is being repeated. They use the word Nippon (にっぽん) as an example. The small tsu is pronounced by creating a break/space in the word, so it’s pronounced nip-pon.
The next thing I’m going to do is look up 20 vocab words about the thing(s) I’m passionate about… I’m not really passionate about anything so I chose cats and sleep. I will be using jisho.org to look up these words.
I think that this is all for tonight. Gotta get up early, shower, and work tomorrow. Once I get home, it’ll be basic grammar time!
Kirsten's Japanese Language Log 