In Japanese, "zoo" is 動物園 (dōbutsuen). It is a noun pronounced "doh-boo-tsoo-eh-n".
Listen to the pronunciation:
動物園 is written in kanji. Romanised as dōbutsuen, it sounds roughly like "doh-boo-tsoo-eh-n" to an English ear.
子供たちは動物園の周りで遊んでいます。
Kodomotachi wa Dōbutsuen no mawari de asonde imasu.
The children are playing around the zoo.
Dōbutsuen (動物園) means zoo in Japanese. This noun describes a feature or object found in indoor or outdoor environments.
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Buy on Steam動物園 is romanised as dōbutsuen. Say it roughly like "doh-boo-tsoo-eh-n" in English. Each Japanese syllable has even weight, so keep the rhythm steady.
動物園 is a neutral, everyday word that works in both casual and polite speech. The level of formality comes from the sentence structure around it, not from the word itself.
動物園 is written using kanji. Kanji characters carry the core meaning; any hiragana or katakana that follow show grammatical endings.
This word is part of the vocabulary taught in the Japanese language learning game Noun Town, where words are introduced through play rather than memorisation.
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