The Ling Space: What Constraints Are There on Linguistic Sounds? Optimality Theory

(The Ling Space)

I'm running out of intelligent things to say about these Ling Space episodes.  My comments are going to be the same as usual.
So, let's march through my usual observations.  As always:
* I feel like I understood this, but barely.  I really had to watch closely, and I kept having to pause and go back
* Once I put in the effort though, I found it interesting
* The Ling Space is like essentially a graduate level linguistics program available for free on Youtube.  It's really cool that they're making all this available for  people.  I wish I had watched all this before I had done my Masters degree.

Those are more or less the same comments I make for every Ling Space review.  But they're true here as well.
As for specifically this episode, I have some experience with Japanese phonotactics from my 8 years living in Japan.  One of the first things foreigners always notice is how Japanese speakers will always add in extra vowels to English words because Japanese only permits /m/ and /n/ in the coda, as The Ling Space said.

In fact I wrote a post back in 2006 about this--Joel's Guide to Japlish.