Teaching the difference between "see" and "she" in English


I've been teaching ESL for over 30 years, but for the last three I've had
almost exclusively Japanese students (I teach mostly 1-on-1 classes over
Skype, to students from High School to Business Executives.) I'm also a
professional linguist and somewhat of a hyperglot, but very much still a
dilettante when it comes to Japanese. My question is this:

Is there any way using _kana_ to represent the unpalatalized /s/ before /i/ or
/ɪ/? When Japanese students read /si/, most of them invariably pronounce /ʃi/
because... well, you know why. I have many workarounds and ways of
demonstrating the difference, but I thought it might be a truckload easier if
there were a way of demonstrating this unequivocally so that when they saw it,
the light would go on immediately.

事前にありがとうございます!




Not perfect but you could point out that in "see" the S sound is very similar
to the S sound in さ [sa] but different from the S sound in しゃ [sha] or し
[shi], and that the EE sound is very similar to the Japanese い [i]. That's how
I have introduced it to students in the past. They almost certainly would have
never noticed that the beginning S sound of し [shi] is different to the other
sounds in the "S" row (さ・す・せ・そ [sa][su][se][so]).

Try and show them the comparison of these two sets of Japanese syllables:

(さ・しゃ) (す・しゅ) (そ・しょ)

They should then be able to distinguish the different "types" of S.

