How To Pronounce “Bonsai”

Apparently there can be some quite heated arguments over the pronunciation of the word “bonsai” and there can actually be some snobbery from people who will go around telling other people they are saying the word wrong and look down on them for doing so.

This all seems a little too much, so I will go through how it can be pronounced properly and hopefully end any arguments once and for all …by telling you that it doesn’t matter how you say it and I will explain why.

Bonsai Is A Japanese Word?

We might all think that Bonsai is Japanese, but it’s actually not. It comes from China …both the word, and the actual art of playing with little trees.

I will give you a very brief and simplified history lesson. Basically many years ago the Chinese had an art form called Penjing, which ended up in Japan and morphed into what we know today as Bonsai.

Something similar happened with the language too, the Japanese didn’t have a writing system and they basically took the Chinese writing system of Kanji and sort of made it work with the Japanese spoken language.

This means a lot of written Chinese and Japanese words have very similar meanings, but slightly different pronunciation. This means that the written word (the kanji) for penjing and bonsai is the same in both languages – 盆栽 

The Chinese pronounce this kanji as Penzai and the Japanese of course say Bonsai. I’m not sure if the japanese originally called it Penzai/Penjing and then slowly it changed over time, along with how the art form changed, but that doesn’t really matter, and neither of this helps pronounce it right, but it’s cool to know.  

What Does The Kanji Mean?

To help us understand where the word comes we need to look at the kanji characters.

Kanji is very interesting and kind of crazy alphabet, each symbol represents a word (sometimes it can mean a few different words) and really the best example we have in English is something like how & or ∞ are the symbols for And and Infinity.  

The Kanji for bonsai is – 盆栽 which as you can see is two kanji symbols, that are used together to create one word.

盆 represents a tray or basin and 栽 represents a planting or plantation.

This is where the “bonsai roughly translates to English as tree in pot” is actually wrong …it’s more “tray planting” but I guess that’s kind of vague so we just change it slightly to make more sense, either way now we can see where the word bonsai comes from.

But again this doesn’t help us pronounce anything, but it’s cool to see where it comes from.  

How To Pronounce Bonsai

If we just look at 盆栽 it can be hard to know how to actually say this, luckily Japanese has another writing system that is slight more similar to our own called Hiragana. This system is more like a system of letters like we know in English and each letter is represented by a singular sound.

This means if you learn Hiragana you can say anything in Japanese. My understanding standing of the Japanese language is no where good enough to understand how they all know what sound to use for each kanji. I think they just memorise it, which is kind of intense, but that doesn’t matter, all we need to know is that each kanji will be pronounced in a certain way and hiragana can help us do that.

The Hiragana and Romanji

As I said, hiragana and our own language are kind of similar and to make things even easier for us, they have created another writing system (there is actually another called katakana too, Japanese is intense).

Anyway, this other writing system is called Romanji, which basically is a play on words for “Roman”, or as we normally call it …Latin, which if you didn’t know, we use the Latin alphabet.

So the romanji writing system turns the Japanese letters into English letters so we can read them.

This is the Hiragana for bonsai –  ぼんさい which you can see is 4 Japanese letters. These translate into the 4 romaji letters of Bo-n-sa-i

This is where it’s get very important to notice that romanji is the English writing of Japanese sounds!

If we look at the first letter   ぼ – this is pronounced Bo by Japanese people, it’s not, two separate letters like in English, their sound system is different, a lot of the single letters they use …we would consider  them “two letters/sounds”

They have many individual sounds like Ra, Ta, Bo, Ho, Ka  and many more… this is how the Japanese language works. As I said before, if you learn hiragana you will be able to say anything in Japanese, this is because hiragana is made up of the 48 sounds (often called syllables) that they use.

Every word in their language can be broken down in these single sounds, it just happens when it’s written in English, it looks like two letters.

This is extremely important to understand as it means romanji it is a sort weird mix of the two languages. You have Japanese sounds now being represented by English letters.

This is exactly why if you learn Japanese they will tell you to never use romaji, it will just confuse you and make you English-ise the Japanese sounds …and pronounce things wrong.

This is exactly what we have done for bonsai. We are now reading an English-ish looking word that is actually pronounced using Japanese sounds.

The Japanese Sound System Is Very Different To English

At times Japanese can be very logical, but other times it can be extremely confusing, especially for English speakers and this can mostly come down to the sound system, and as I said, things like romanji do not make it any easier for us.

The first thing you will notice with Japanese sounds is they pronounce the ん sound every different to an English N sound. (ん is written N in romanji)  This means if you listen to a Japanese person say Bonsai … the N part may sound very strange to us.

I think this is really where the argument comes over its pronunciation, as this one letter can sound really different in isolation from the rest of the word.

We Don’t Understand Pitch Accent

You then also have the issue of pitch accent, which is a concept we don’t have in English. Basically the pitch of a word can change half way through and there are a number of different patterns that Japanese words follow and if you get this wrong you will pronounce the word wrong and may actually end up saying a different word.

This is sort of like how we put stress on certain parts of the word, and if we stress the wrong parts, it sounds wrong, but it’s not stress, its pitch, which is a very strange concept for us to understand.

The classic example is that the word for chopstick and bridge look the same in Japanese, but the pitch is different and therefore how you say it is slightly different …so anyone who doesn’t understand this usually asks for a bridge to go with their ramen.

Bonsai uses the heiban pitch pattern, meaning the fist letter starts low, and goes up in pitch where it stays for the rest of the word.

This is another thing that I think has a lot to do with our pronunciation arguments, since you have the Bo part of the word starting low and then going in to a higher pitch N, which as I already discussed, sounds different from English anyway. 

This is going to make the word bonsai sound very different when spoken by a Japanese person compared to an English speaker and to be honest, most people trying to say it in a more Japanese way are probably not getting this pitch right too.

There are also regional accents in Japan, where a lot of the difference between them is how pitch is used on certain words, although from my understanding the word Bonsai, will sound the same up and down the country as its pitch is fairly neutral, but I could be wrong with that. My Japanese language levels are nowhere near good enough to be sure and my Japanese friends don’t speak good enough English for me to double check.  

Let’s Put This All Together

Now we understand how Japanese works, we can start to understand how bonsai is actually pronounced.

Basically its… Bo-n Sa-i

So, I’m sure that clears it all up …or maybe not. …maybe that is because it doesn’t matter…

It Doesn’t Matter How You Say It

So I’ve went into a lot of detail about how the language works, maybe too much, and not really explained how to say it correctly and that is ultimately it doesn’t matter.

You can say –  Bone-sigh, Bone-sai or even Bonn-zai

Everything I have discussed above is in relation to speaking Japanese. If you are speaking Japanese then the correct phonetics are required along with the correct pitch.

If you are speaking English, or I guess any other language beside Japanese, then say it however you feel is right.

I am sure some of you reading this may be Japanese, or speak much better Japanese than me, but that doesn’t matter, if you are saying the word in a non-japanese language, then just say whatever feels most comfortable.

Why It Doesn’t Matter How You Pronounce It

I will go through some other reason why it really doesn’t matter why how you pronounce it and why you might actually be pronouncing it right.

It’s A Loan Word

At the end of the day, Bonsai, in its Latin alphabet form is just a loan word.

Really that means the first English speaker to see a bonsai asked what it was called and the rely was –  ぼんさい. Then instead of making up a new words for it, they said “Okay, that sounds like you said bonsai, we will call it that too, but” and then wrote it down in English. 

That sounds silly, but this happens ALL the time in English. Especially back in the day when modern English was starting to be formed. I am sure if you speak any other language you will very quickly know what I’m talking about.

Bonsai is just a word we took from Japanese and made our own as such, so there is no “right or wrong pronunciation”

There is of course a right Japanese pronunciation, but as I’ve already said, that only matter if you are speaking Japanese.

Other Japanese Loan Words Are Said Wrong

To really show the hypocrisy of it all, we can look at all the other Japanese loan words we use on a daily bases …where we don’t get into fights over the pronunciation.

Words like karaoke, tsunami, anime, karate, and basically any Japanese food you can think of are all loan words and we are usually saying them “wrong”. It gets really crazy when you look at other bonsai related words and realise we are saying a lot these with the wrong pronunciation too, such a nabari or akadama.

Of course they are only wrong if you are speaking Japanese, the reality is these are now English words, and we say them in the way we say them, because that is how loan words usually work.

An easy example of this is the word Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. We often say this ya-kuz-a …when in Japanese itsヤクザ, which is actually pronounced more like  ya-ku-za. A small difference, but it still makes a difference.

This just shows we adapt loan words to fit our own syllable system and over time they get pronounced “wrong” and just become the normal way of saying things.

We Pronounce Other Countries Loan Words Wrong

We see the exact same things happen with the words we take from other countries. If we look to France, we stole half their language. We changed a few of the spellings to make thing easier for us … as well as the pronunciations.

Although if you look at more direct words we have loaned, such as croissant, you can see there is a huge difference in how we pronounce it.

The same goes for basically any Italian food you can think of. All those pasta names are just directly taken from Italian, and we just say them in an English way. In fact if someone starts pronouncing them with a more authentic Italian pronunciation we think are being some sort of pompous idiot.

This is just how loan words work, we take them and assimilate them into our own language.   

Other Countries Do This Too

This phenomena works in both directions, if you look at any other language they will have taken words from us and made them their own.

The Japanese are actually the masters of this. Remember I said they had another writing system, called katana … they use this pretty much only for loan words. They also absolutely make sure the words they take fit in with the rest of their words and they have no shame in altering them to make them easier to pronounce with their sound system.

These words almost sound like they are just saying them with a strong Japanese accent but that’s what they do and no one complains.

It actually makes understanding spoken Japanese every easy. Words like Furansu or Supein are easily recognisable as France and Spain.

We All Have Different Accents

We also all have different accents and so how we say the word bonsai will sound different depending on where we are from.

I am sure if you have watched any of my youtube videos you will know my accent is most likely very different to yours and that is just part of life, so if I say it slightly different to you, then that’s just the way it is. 

I am sure I pronounce many other words differently to you, but you can still understand me and vice versa.

Banzai Is Not Bonsai

I think it is very important to note that the word “banzai” has nothing to do with the little trees and is in fact a sort of chant that people shout in Japan.

It normally is shouted at the emperor in a sort of “God save the Queen” way that the British do, so it’s sort of means “Long live the Emperor”. It comes from a Chinese word that means 10 thousand years, so really they are sort of saying they want the emperor to live for a long time, but in general it’s just seen as sort of patriotic or joyful thing to shout.

It is quite a famous chant from the war, as Kamikaze pilots and Japanese soldiers would shout it, I guess as a sort of “For Japannnn” type war cry as they advanced into battle.   

Conclusion

So I have gone through a lot of stuff here about the Japanese language. It is actually really fascinating and while it can seem intimidating it isn’t too bad.

However, hopefully you have got the message that how you pronounce bonsai doesn’t matter.

If you want to say it like a Japanese person, that’s fine, but don’t look down on people who say it in more English sounding way. 

The only time you really need to pronounce it like a Japanese person, is if you are speaking Japanese and you want that 日本語上手 compliment, which is unlikely for the vast majority of you.

(You can read more about – Common Bonsai Terminology For Beginners)