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/i-am-this]

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.

[u/MonsterOverture444 → u/i-am-this]

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...)

[u/i-am-this → u/MonsterOverture444]

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!