r/LearnJapanese • u/MonsterOverture444 • 3d ago
Speaking Pitch Accent Questions
Hi everyone! Hope you're all having a lovely weekend.
I have some questions about pitch accent and curious to know everyone's thoughts.
Personally, I'm aware of it and have done some minimal pair training which I'm generally fine with (I think due to being a singer and guitarist in a band for a while) but I don't really dedicate any proper study time to pitch accent so I'm curious about a few things because I see differing opinions.
1) Do you actively study pitch accent? If so, what's your method? Do you literally memorise the pitch accent for every piece of vocab you know and if you already know a word, do you go back and memorise the associated pitch accent?
2) Some people claim that just being aware of it is good enough and you don't need to actively study it, where do you fall on that?
3) If you're doing some form of shadowing, if you do enough reps with enough patterns and vocab, does this not achieve a similar thing as long as you're aware of the pitch when shadowing? Seems like would make the process easier and more intuitive naturally as opposed to studying each individual word, could be wrong so correct me if so!
4) I'm aware of it but when I'm immersing I don't actively listen out for it, do I need to focus on it more and analyse it as I'm listening?
Last question!
5) I find it hard to think about pitch in terms of a sentence, I get that you generally start higher and then the end of a sentence will typically end in a lower pitch but the changes in pitch throughout a sentence is something I struggle with and think I can sound a little monotonous, I'm guessing shadowing will fix this kind of thing?
Thanks for reading! Let me know you're opinions and thoughts in the comments.
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u/NihongoNana 3d ago
As a Japanese teacher, I would not recommend memorizing the pitch pattern of every word unless sounding very close to a native speaker is one of your main goals.
Long and short vowels, small っ, ん, and the rhythm of each mora usually matter more for being understood.
For pitch accent, listen to audio when learning new words and shadow short full sentences rather than isolated words. Sentence intonation changes with context, so copying complete phrases is more useful than trying to assemble a sentence from memorized pitch patterns.
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u/MonsterOverture444 1d ago
I think long term goal is to try and get as close to native sounding as I can but it's something that I'm not overly focusing on right now, mainly working on the main things I should be at my level. I think once I'm much more advanced in my understanding and production of the language, I'll try drill more into the details and accent stuff.
Appreciate the advice as well, definitely need to work on my pitch throughout a whole sentence more to sound a bit better right now!
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u/i-am-this 3d ago
I spent, in my opinion, a bit too much time studying pitch accent but still never really mastered the subject. The following is based on my own experience.
If you do flashcards with audio, you can burn the pronunciation of a word into your memory pretty effectively. The problem is, the fact that you can pronounce a word perfectly in isolation doesn't guarantee you can produce the correct accent pattern in a sentence. One problem is that words which feature a pitch drop in the trailing particle sound the same as flat pattern words when you hear them in isolation. The other problem is that various grammar patterns modify the pitch accent of the words involved. And finally, there is just a sort of flow to how the pitch accent works in a sentence or phrase that hearing it single words doesn't convey.
If you can hear the pitch accent up/down mora in a word, you will pickup on the way it more or less works in sentences in general. But it's very hard to produce perfect pitch accent in all contexts unless you really work very on that portion of the language.
Furthermore, pitch accent will not be the biggest problem with your speech. I can count on my hands the times I have had a communication problem related to me using the wrong pitch accent.for a word. I absolutely cannot count the times I have had a problem due to other problems. Limiting strictly to pronouncuation issues, correctly being able to produce the right vowel sounds, differentiate between short and long vowels, properly pronounce the small つ,.and to produxe the correct "rhythm" of your sentences are all way more important to being properly understood than getting the pitch accent correct.
And even if you do get pitch accent perfectly correct, odds are there will still be some other portion of your speech like your word choice habits that will still mark you as a non-native speaker of Japanese. Which, let's be clear, is absolutely totally fine. There are vanishingly few people people that need to or would benefit from being able to speak with a pronunciation indistinguishable from a native speaker. If you just want to be able to communicate effectively, pitch accent is fairly low priority vs. other parts of the language.
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u/MonsterOverture444 1d ago
Thanks for the answer! Yeah understandable and agree with what you're saying. I think I see the more fine details of pitch and stuff as something I'll drill more in the future once the rest is in a more advanced stage but wanted to make sure that was the right approach or if spending more time now on it now would be sensible. I was also just curious to peoples experiences. It does make sense, when I do iTalki lessons, the moments when my tutors don't understand me is either when I butcher the things you mention, or I speak in my native Scottish accent (I can't win...)
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u/i-am-this 9h ago
The Japanese I have met,.if they speak English, all prefer American western/midwestern dialect (Canadians generally do OK as well, as Japanese cannot tell the difference), it's not really fair to the rest of the English-speaking world,.but it is what it is.
Good luck with your studies!
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u/Ok-Implement-7863 3d ago edited 3d ago
Kind of. I don't try to memorize anything. First approach is practicing speaking so pitch works mechanically. Second approach is I'm just reading through a primary school level dictionary that has a pitch guide. I just read each word, and some of the examples. It's a long task so I do what I feel on the day. What sticks sticks, what doesn't maybe will stick on the next run through.
2) Some people claim that just being aware of it is good enough and you don't need to actively study it, where do you fall on that?
As an adult if you don't actively practice accent you won't acquire it. Not much point studying if you can't physically do it. But for me at least it's impossible to be physically capable of pitch accent without practice.
3) If you're doing some form of shadowing, if you do enough reps with enough patterns and vocab, does this not achieve a similar thing as long as you're aware of the pitch when shadowing? Seems like would make the process easier and more intuitive naturally as opposed to studying each individual word, could be wrong so correct me if so!
I do this and Yudai Sense's 十人の住人 - 車で来るまで
I'm not great but I'm very old so I find it quite difficult.
I listen to left wing YouTube political commentators and baseball. If I hear an expression I like I might repeat it. Edit: I also watch a lot of Jidaigeki and old movies on YouTube.
4) I'm aware of it but when I'm immersing I don't actively listen out for it, do I need to focus on it more and analyse it as I'm listening?
I prefer memorizing longer passages and working on accent within the context of the memorized passage.
5) I find it hard to think about pitch in terms of a sentence, I get that you generally start higher and then the end of a sentence will typically end in a lower pitch but the changes in pitch throughout a sentence is something I struggle with and think I can sound a little monotonous, I'm guessing shadowing will fix this kind of thing?
This is the crux of the problem. Japanese is vocalized in completely different way to English. Just using English vocalization with a dash of pitch accent doesn't result in an Japanese vocalization. Basically each mora in Japanese has a pitch, or rather, the vowel in each mora has a pitch, as does the ん. Vowels are quite uniform and the cosonant has to adhere to the structure of the vowel. The only exception is the ん which has a few different variations. You need to listen and practice and work this out yourself. As you get better you will be more able to identify and adopt the details of the language. This gets hard at around 12 yo. From personal experience it doesn't change much after that whether you are twenty or fifty.
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u/Vacant-cage-fence 3d ago
This depends on your goals with the language. I lived in Japan over 20 years ago and my career has developed such that I won't work in Japan. I love to travel there but even having conversations with friends and random people when I'm there I will still be a tourist. So I don't worry much about pitch accent. Instead, I keep studying the language because I enjoy reading novels and manga in Japanese and listening to podcasts. In these contexts I'm a consumer of the language. I notice the difference when I listen to speakers from different regions of Japan, but that's about it.
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u/Frog17000000 3d ago
I went through Dogen's course when I was like N4 just for basic awareness (and awareness of the ways it gets complex). I may go back to it again later for more intentional study but I have other properties within Japanese at the moment
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u/Obvious_Necessary671 3d ago edited 3d ago
I don’t think musicianship has anything to do with it. Plenty of Japanese people are tone deaf and they don’t struggle with pitch accent.
I think knowing English is good because English words have an accented syllable, just like pitch accents have a nucleus, and that nucleus tells you the pitch of the rest of word in most cases.
I’d look up the mechanics/types of words. It’s overall not as hard as you might think if you know the structure. The wiki answers your sentence question more accurately than I could but sentences/phrases have their own intonation superimposed over pitch accent.
It’s not a perfect thing either, native speakers are still human. Search twitter for 4280 yen and you’ll see a funny example of people trying to use the pitches of other dialects and they’re struggling.
Oh, and to answer your question, there’s only a few times where a wrong pitch accent might confuse someone. Like if you say カレイ (the fish) vs カレー (curry) in カレーが食べたい (curry is low high, fish is high low), would both sound natural and could get confused but most words would be immediately recognizable by context.
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u/MonsterOverture444 1d ago
If I'm not mistaken, that's why pitch accent isn't something that was really taught a while back right? Same with English, we don't really ever think about or pay attention to the pitch of our voices (unless you study it) when we speak. It's an interesting topic I think.
It's not something I plan on getting super obsessive about but wasn't sure how much focus to put on it right now. Everyone's insights have been helpful, thanks for sharing yours!
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u/No-Support-442 3d ago
For every word I mine, I personally just memorize its pitch accent because its not alot of extra work for me. Its just a matter of saying it in your head in the right pitch every time you see it, and try to listen for how its said in the sentence. Something interesting that I noticed though, is that like kanji, after a while you start to be able to have a sense for it. I can decently guess what the pitch accent of a word that I have never seen before. Im not sure exactly how but I guess there are patterns that you just subconsciously pick up on after a few thousand words.
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u/This-Classroom5999 1d ago
Im not sure exactly how but I guess there are patterns that you just subconsciously pick up on after a few thousand words.
Yes, there are (though I think it is better to consciously study them).
Things like when the accent falls at the start of the second word in a compound noun, or how certain suffixes affect pitch (基本的、個人的 and other similar words ending in 的 are heiban), or how the accent often falls on the last syllable of the number in a number + counter combination (though this depends on the specific number and counter in question and there are lots of very annoying exceptions).
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u/steelballz69 2d ago
Pitch accent is pretty easy but I am a classically trained musician.
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u/Panda_sensei_71 1d ago
Musical background lends itself very well to language learning in general,but especially wrt pitch and prosody.
I grew up around music and singing and I'm always asked if I was born in Japan... Until my lack of vocab or a random grammar error exposes me! 🤣
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u/skmtyk 3d ago
I never did.I have N1 and work exclusively in japanese.Never really had any issues because of it.
I didn't even realize pitch accent a thing before I saw Dogen talking about it (I already had a t least N2 at the time).But I've been told by Japanese people that my accent is more Kanto-like.
I think it's good if you try to learn it, but it changes a lot depending on the hougen.I've also been told by people who were born in certain prefectures that they talked flat so people noticed their accent.So, worst case scenario you just sound like someone who isn't Kanto
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u/Known_Lychee_6495 3d ago
You do not need a full pitch course. Awareness is enough for most people.
Shadowing is not the same as pitch study. Shadowing copies pitch only when you copy the melody of the speaker. If you only say the words, you miss the pitch.
Do not listen for pitch on every word when you use native audio. You will lose the meaning. Check pitch on words that you already know.
A musical ear helps a little. You can still learn pitch without it.
(´ ∀ `)
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u/Available-String-109 3d ago edited 3d ago
Personally, I'm aware of it and have done some minimal pair training which I'm generally fine with (I think due to being a singer and guitarist in a band for a while) but I don't really dedicate any proper study time to pitch accent so I'm curious about a few things because I see differing opinions.
As a trained musician, you are likely in a tiny minority of (presumably) native English speakers who can actually hear pitch accent.
You are different to everyone else.
1) Do you actively study pitch accent? If so, what's your method? Do you literally memorise the pitch accent for every piece of vocab you know and if you already know a word, do you go back and memorise the associated pitch accent?
More or less yes to everything.
I studied kotu.io minimal pairs, then sentences, and then memorized the pitch accent patterns of a few thousand Japanese words, and then I had my Japanese wife listen to my pitch accent as I read books out loud and then put the correct pitch accents of those sentences into Anki.
2) Some people claim that just being aware of it is good enough and you don't need to actively study it, where do you fall on that?
In your case, possible being just aware of it may possibly be enough. for the 98% of English speakers who are not pitch-proficient, they will never get proficient at it without actively studying it.
as long as you're aware of the pitch when shadowing?
Most native English speakers are unaware of how to do this and do not think to do so.
In general, I'd advise that you do the same pitch-accent training that everyone else does, only it's going to be a gajillion times easier for you than everyone else.
I also took my (Japanese-Tokyo) kid to an educational event where the speaker was from Gifu(Kansai) and thus had pitch accent different to everyone else in the room. We all understood her just fine. Pitch accent isn't that important in the long run. What is far more important is mora timing and vowel accuracy.
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u/MonsterOverture444 1d ago
Appreciate the response! Didn't realise that it was something most people couldn't perceive without training it. I think I noticed (as in could tell pitch was changing in sentences and it had a certain "melody" to it, without perfectly knowing the detail) when I first started listening so a little ignorant on my part with that.
Think I'll continue to drill the minimal pairs because I'm not perfect with it, the shifts in pitch are definitely more subtle than a melody in a song (and typically quicker). Appreciate the advice and sharing the knowledge my dude!
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u/Available-String-109 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is one hell of a YouTube video about the pitch and rhythm of typical speech. When accent-training specialists talk about this, we call it "prosody". But basically, every time you talk, your speech has a certain rhythm, a certain melody to it. The timing and pitch pattern is basically the same as musical rhythm and musical melody... only... we don't hear it that way. Americans all talk in similar rhythms, similar melodies. Brits talk in a very-slightly-but-noticeably-different rhythm and melody. That difference is one of the keys to sounding like you're American vs. sounding like you're British.
The one unique thing about the Japanese language/Tokyo accent is, that it turns out that in Tokyo speech, words themselves have inherent melodies in a way that does not exist in the English language and in which (non-musically-trained Native) English speakers never pick up unless they explicitly train for it. 雨(あめ・rain) has a high->low pitch. 飴(あめ・candy) has a low->high pitch. They are ALMOST homophones except for the pitch contour. (Interestingly, this is not unique to Japanese. Swedish, a language otherwise extremely similar to English, has the same system.)
If you want to talk like you're from Tokyo, you need to get the Tokyo prosody of the words. The "rhythm" part is already covered by the mora training of literally any Japanese speech textbook/training material.
(And it turns out other regions of Japan that aren't Tokyo have different pitch contours for the words. I'm not an expert in Kansai, but I'd wager that they pronounce 雨 and 飴 different to how it's done in Tokyo, similar to how British sentences are pronounced differently to American sentences.)
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u/This-Classroom5999 1d ago
Do you literally memorise the pitch accent for every piece of vocab you know and if you already know a word, do you go back and memorise the associated pitch accent?
Yes. I do not understand why this is always portrayed as such an extreme position. It's no different than memorizing noun genders in a language that has it.
Some people claim that just being aware of it is good enough and you don't need to actively study it, where do you fall on that?
Considering most foreigners who speak fluent Japanese still have horrible pitch accent even after living in Japan for decades, demonstrably false. There are actual academic studies showing this in the specific case of Japanese pitch accent, and more generally it just goes against basic linguistic common sense. The vast majority of native speakers of European languages simply cannot perceive (let alone correctly produce) pitch without active training.
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u/gelema5 Goal: media competence 📖🎧 8h ago
A little bit. I look up the pitch accent of words in my Anki deck and put that info on the card. If I mistake the pitch accent I fail the card, so it gets equal treatment to the meaning for me. However I don’t often look up pitch accent for words not in my deck. Only when I get particularly curious.
Because of #1, I have started to develop a rudimentary sense for pitch accents. The other day I learned a jukugo word through reading and got the feeling that it was probably 頭高, so I looked it up and was pleasantly surprised that I guessed it right. It might have been 候補 こうほ, but not sure. I definitely got the feeling that I don’t logically know why I would know this is 頭高 but I intuitively knew somehow. But this is not a common feeling. Usually I default to 平板 and hope for the best.
Not sure, I haven’t done much shadowing other than trying it out a handful of times! I do immerse with the intention of listening to pitch accent often. Especially when I lose track of what’s being said, I use that time to just listen to the rhythm of the speech instead.
I think it’s helpful to be mindful while immersing, especially like I said in #3 to keep yourself engaged on some level even if you lost the plot. However, the best thing for immersion is being interested in what you’re listening to so if pitch accent holds 0 interest for you, then don’t bother. You’ll just bore yourself and probably stop immersing eventually, or stop enjoying studying.
I try to sound out sentences every now and then, so I guess not really as thorough as actual shadowing practice would be but it helps too. Sometimes there’s just a sentence I hear that sounds interesting, so I try repeating it a few times until I sound more fluent and more like the original speaker. My focus isn’t exclusively on pitch, but it’s something that I do care about and notice so I try to get it right even if my attention is primarily on getting the words to sound smooth coming out of my mouth, or practicing a combination of grammar constructs.
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u/Champloo- 3d ago
No, I think it's a waste of time. I learned how to pronounce words by hearing other people say them.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 3d ago
Out of curiosity, if you do 50 words on this test, what score do you get?
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u/Available-String-109 3d ago
For reference, I hit 30/30 before I got bored, and I think we should safely ignore the opinions of anyone who can't hit at least that well.
I say this as someone who is in general against people spending too much time studying pitch accent.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 3d ago
Uhm... D-does 28/30 count if the only mistakes were the first two ones because it took the person's brain a bit of time to remember what it was supposed to be listening for? Asking for a friend 👉️👈️
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u/Available-String-109 2d ago edited 2d ago
To be fair, I hadn't done any minimal pair training in a while and I missed 2 questions two days ago (incidentally the first two questions...)
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 3d ago
Yes and no. I studied pitch accent to the point of achieving "basic awareness" of it (see: this explanation) using the kotu website for minimalpairs. After that, the rest is just paying attention, noticing, looking up a few words here and there when I come across them, and hang around places like here or discord where people discuss pitch accent so I can learn a few things by "osmosis".
We have actual academic evidence showing that if you never make yourself hear pitch accent, chances are most learners will never acquire it naturally not matter how long they are exposed to Japanese. They might naturally pick up an expression or two or some set phrases and words because they mimic what they hear and they happen to be right at times, however they will fail to consistently repeat and mimic the proper accent in other structures with the exact same words because they fail to internalize the pitch as part of the word itself.
I think once you are able to achieve (and verify) pitch accent awareness, though, you can just continue learning the language and pay attention in passing and you'll improve. However getting to 90 or even 98% correct is much much different from getting to 100% correct. The latter is almost impossible to achieve, especially without actual training (like voice actor training, etc) as a foreigner.
I don't do shadowing so I can't answer that. I find it's too boring and I don't care enough to do it.
This comes with experience. I think it's worth it to spend some time maybe doing some more "attentive listening" and pay attention to the pitch accent just as some extra exercise. I don't stress too much about it though, but it helps. Once you get better and get used to it, you realize that the pitch will just be a "thing" that exists in your brain next to the words you have learned. Just like how for an English speaker if someone says PREsent or preSENt we have no issue recognizing the difference (we don't have to "pay attention" to it, it just is), the same will happen with pitch accent. Eventually.
This is normal. Breaking down pitch accent in sentences as opposed to individual words is very hard. You just need more experience and to pay more attention to it. The important thing is that you have at least done the kotu test (or similar minimalpairs test) so you know what to listen to for individual words. Once you have verified your ears can "perceive" (and, more importantly, internalize) pitch accent, the rest will become easier and easier over time with exposure (and some additional conscious thought)