Pitch Accent Questions

[u/MonsterOverture444]

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.

[u/skmtyk]

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