It’s funny how, in all my studies of Japanese, and their obsession with all things cute, the thing I love the most is how some Japanese women say “ka”. They pronounce it “kaw”, and it’s the cutest thing ever.

It’s funny because the Japanese have built entire industries on being cute. Idol culture, schoolgirls, kawaii culture, mascots. Animal faces on everything, etc., and the cutest thing is how some women say “ka”.

I first heard that pronunciation on a game with Japanese voiceovers, and I thought they were doing it just to be cute. But I think it’s actually a dialectical thing.

I love the way they say “desu” too. We Americans tend to pronounce it like we would pronounce “desk”, but I think that’s subtly wrong. The Japanese phonetic structure doesn’t have different sounds for the same vowel, so it stands to reason that it would be pronounced somewhere between a short e and a long a in English. But even there, some Japanese women just make it cute.

I could listen to it all day.

Maybe that makes me weird. Or maybe it just makes me male.