The comments here (not yours, dicytea) are really confusing. There are three comments about Japanese although the article clearly states that they live in the Amazon rainforest. Are those AI bots?
Doesn't seem to be bots. Maybe it's just that Japanese phonetics are so limited, that any word that has a possible pronunciation in Japanese becomes a Japanese word in their mind. Funny pattern matching error.
I have also on (very) rare occasion used Japanese to clear up a pronunciation thing, because of the variety in English. The one that mentions Google Translate I figure probably was doing that, which I kinda took as "...maybe it could be..?" and just wanted to clarify something in my original comment, which I figure added to the confusion in further comments. I tried to keep it clear I wasn't sure it actually was Japanese but I guess that didn't stick.
Roughly, (t)see-ma-nay or chi-ma-nay. The first sound is an affricate consonant, similar to the sounds spelled ch or j in English (e.g. the final sound of "catch" in General American). The last sound should properly be spelled é, not just e, and is similar to the sound spelled with that letter in French or the sound spelled "ay" in English words like "pray" (also in General American).
It's Tsimane' because the name of the language ends in a glottal stop. Sometimes this is mistranscribed into Tsimané in Spanish but that is incorrect; the stress is on the second to last syllable.
> The last sound should properly be spelled é, not just e
Assuming this is a Japanese word as the other response uses (the article doesn't really make it clear), there's at least two different transliteration styles for that sound, one of which is "é", the other of which is "e". I'd argue over the past decade or two the second one has become more common due to simplicity, direct transliteration of individual hiragana, and IME inputs. Names still seem to use the older style though.
Though here the author did seem to be going for "é", but didn't have a way to type it so they approximated it by adding a ' afterwards.
In katakana it's a combination of "tsu" and a small "i" (ツィ), it exists for loanwords. Part of why I'm unsure this is actually a Japanese word despite the other comments - even if it is actually used in Japanese it's probably an approximation of another language.
the other key to pronouncing japanese as an American, starter pack, is to NOT put stress on syllables the way we do. Japanese green horseradish (like with sushi) is not waSAAbi the way we want to pronounce it, it's something like three equal syllables pronounced distinctly wa. sa. bi. then put them together and pronounce them fast wa.sa.bi.
UK English has the same stress patterns as American English (Shakespeare, iambic pentameter) but I just haven't given any thought to whether my advice would be any different
I said "starter pack" because imho the first step is to stop pronouncing things American. Japanese does have some stress patterns, but you're not going to learn them easily. So just learn to flatten out the American stress and you are 80/20 there.
Because you are so used to American stress, to your ear it will sound like you are saying WAAsabi, which is closer to your goal, but don't do that on purpose, and not long syllables, not waaaa saaaa biiii, clip them short and just flatten them out, wasabi and you'll be fine.
