Approaches to pitch accent? - Printable Version

Approaches to pitch accent? - Printable Version

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Approaches to pitch accent? - Javizy - 2010-01-27

I'm not sure what the general consensus is on the forum, but too many times I've heard people dismiss pitch accent with comments like 'it changes from prefecture to prefecture anyway' and 'you'll be understood from the context'. Considering the number of times I've been corrected, its importance seems to be massively underestimated.

If you stress the wrong syllable in an English word, you can end up being outright incomprehensible, in addition to sounding very strange. Perhaps the two don't quite equate, but I'm sure when you say 飼う instead of 買う and 居間 instead of 今, you sound pretty strange too, if you're not completely misunderstood.

Learners of English can moan about wacky spellings, but as long as they learn phonemic script and have a good dictionary, they're never going to have a problem pronouncing anything (probably). So what are our options? Will general shadowing and audio exposure be enough, or do we need a bit more attention to detail?

I've been considering getting my friend to record sentences containing words I have particular problems with, and making them into a deck for systematic shadowing. Does anybody else have any good ideas?

Approaches to pitch accent? - yudantaiteki - 2010-01-27

Pitch accent is tough. The people who claim you will pick it up automatically are wrong, the people who say it doesn't matter that much are partially right but my opinion is always this -- if pitch accent is the only thing that's wrong with your Japanese you'll probably be OK, but if you're like most people, it's probably pitch accent plus a host of other things that make your Japanese sound unnatural.

Very few books intended for foreigners cover pitch accent. Japanese: The Spoken Language is the only book I know of that marks accent on the words and conversations, and has information on how pitch accent changes.

Really I think the only way to do it is to get a native speaker to listen to you talk and make corrections. You can study the accents of words as well; there are dictionaries like goo.ne.jp that tell you the accent of each word, although sometimes it's not quite the same when it's in a sentence.

Or you can go to a 無アクセント region like Tochigi and forget about it Wink

(I just had my pitch accent corrected today on　たばこ; it's unaccented but I put the accent on the second mora. I think I tend to fudge accent by pronouncing everything as just LHHHH except for specific words I know are different like the Wh-words, 僕, etc. For たばこ because I was saying たばこは？ I dropped down for the こ, I guess.)

Approaches to pitch accent? - howtwosavealif3 - 2010-01-27

Oh yeah I totally mis-underestimated pitch accent all this time till i saw this:

Kansai vs. Standard Japanese. It's pretty interesting how it goes high and low etc.
The video is pretty hilarious & i loved the 正解やけど、腹が立つねんけど

Approaches to pitch accent? - nest0r - 2010-01-27

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=67448#pid67448

Approaches to pitch accent? - Jaunty - 2010-01-27

yudantaiteki Wrote:Very few books intended for foreigners cover pitch accent. Japanese: The Spoken Language is the only book I know of that marks accent on the words and conversations, and has information on how pitch accent changes.

One of the books I used back in the day, An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, also indicated pitch accent in all the vocab lists. They don't really talk about pitch much aside from that though.

Approaches to pitch accent? - LaLoche - 2010-01-27

Here's another one: Japanese Step by Step, while it had many disadvantages (e.g. romaji), really stressed the pitch accent from the very beginning, and every word had it indicated.

Approaches to pitch accent? - magamo - 2010-01-28

I think you should know that the types of pitch accent systems don't always refer to the difference in pitch patterns. In most of the pitch accent systems, a speaker feels a mora is "accented" when the following mora has noticeably lower pitch. For example, あめ with lower pitch at め has an accent on あ because of the pitch drop.

This "accent" is used to distinguish words that have the same kana and sentence structures. In other words, a pitch accent system uses pitch in voice to distinguish words and/or mark grammatical aspects. Different dialects can have different types of pitch accent systems. But placing an accent isn't the sole purpose of pitch in Japanese. So learning pitch doesn't always mean learning pitch accent.

無アクセント (aka 崩壊アクセント) is the pitch accent system where native speakers of dialects with 無アクセント don't feel that the preceding more is accented when pitch falls. This doesn't mean you can forget about pitch because rising and falling have roles other than giving an accent to a word. It's NOT "no pitch." It's "no accent made by pitch." So don't be fooled by people who say you don't need to learn pitch if you speak a 無アクセント (mixed/neutral pitch accent) dialect. It never means you can speak without changing pitch like a robot or choose pitch for each more at random.

I don't know how to learn to feel accents made by pitch, but I guess practically it's better for learners to focus on pitch patters/changes. Maybe you start feeling accents as your Japanese gets better.

You should decide which kind of pitch pattern you learn. As is often said, it varies from region to region and generation to generation. But not all dialects are intelligible to every native Japanese speaker. So if communication is your goal, you might want to pick major dialects and pitch patters that can be understood by the majority of Japanese speakers. Here is a very rough classification that I think could help you choose the right one for you:

NHK accent: The most "proper" pitch patterns you hear on NHK TV programs. This also has the most "proper" pronunciation phoneme-wise, i.e., this is the proper あ, い, う, え, お, etc. No one other than NHK news anchors etc. would articulate Japanese that accurately in real life. It doesn't change as fast as other accents/dialects, so it always retains older pitch patterns/pronunciations/grammar/vocabulary. Technically you can't speak very colloquial languages like slang with this accent for obvious reasons.

Professionally trained proper accent: Sort of a mix of the NHK accent and the vernacular in Tokyo. This admits newer pitch patters and pronunciations to an extent. You can hear voice actors speak with this accent in TV ads, anime, etc. The vernacular and/or regional dialects can have a stronger influence when actors need to act convincingly, so this category is somewhat wider than the NHK accent. You could say the NHK accent is the extreme example of this.

首都圏方言 (metropolitan Tokyo accent): A mix of the older dialect used in Tokyo, standard Japanese like professionally trained proper accent, and other dialects used in other regions. The average Japanese guy from Tokyo would speak with this accent. Most of the languages spoken on TV fall into this or professionally trained proper accent category. I suppose you could say this is the pronunciations and pitch patterns of the vernacular Japanese language spoken by ordinary people. Younger generations speak with a more regionally neutral version of this and often have a tint of pitch patters of the Kansai dialect.

関西弁/関西標準語 (Kansai dialect): The dialect spoken in the Kansai region. This is the most complicated dialect with respect to pitch patterns. This has a larger number of pitch patterns than other dialects, so it is often said that this is the most difficult dialect for native Japanese speakers from another region to master. Many comedians use this pitch accent. A lot of dramas, movies, anime, etc. have characters who pronounce words with the pitch patterns of this dialect.

There are many other dialects with noticeably different pitch patters, but these four are the only accents that can be understood by pretty much every native Japanese speaker. There is nothing wrong with minor regional dialects, but I guess most learners would find these more useful.

As for learning methods, you definitely need to do a lot of practice if you want to master pitch. Many native Japanese speakers from regions other than Kanto can't speak standard pitch patterns used in 首都圏方言 very well despite the fact that they have been exposed to them on TV for a long time. Actually a lot of native speakers from different regions fail to master pitch patters of another dialect after living in the region where the dialect is spoken for more than a decade. So it's not surprising if it takes non-native speakers years to learn a dialect.

Approaches to pitch accent? - Grinkers - 2010-01-28

Great read as always, Magamo!

I feel as though I'm reaching "fluency" in Japanese, however I know my accent is pretty bad. I won't be happy until I'm indistinguishable from a Japanese, so "bad" doesn't really mean much. People mistake me for Japanese through writing sometimes, and I'd really like the same when speaking too.

I've tried things like shadowing, but I just can't do it. My brain just can't process sounds and say them at any speed or language... I think it just won't work for me. My right ear is deaf, so that might have something to do with it, but my left ear is 100% normal.

My Japanese friends don't have any problem understanding me, but they tell me my pitch just sounds weird (supposedly my sounds are alright). I've been told a few times they can tell I'm a foreigner, but have no idea where from. Most can hear my first language as English, but sometimes it's Chinese... and I only know about 5 words in Chinese.

I'm really stumped at how to improve it.

Approaches to pitch accent? - vix86 - 2010-01-28

Just going to add a little bit to this that might help some.

As has been mentioned already, the resources for picking up 'proper' Japanese accent is limited at best. However, dictionaries do exist.

On my CASIO XD-SF6300 電子辞書 there is a 国語辞書 for accent that's called NHK日本語発音アクセント辞書. Its a fairly simple dictionary (examples below). There appears to be a printed version of it in existence (http://www.amazon.co.jp/NHK%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BA%E9%9F%B3%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88%E8%BE%9E%E5%85%B8-NHK%E6%94%BE%E9%80%81%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E7%A0%94%E7%A9%B6%E6%89%80/dp/4140111127) if you want that, but just about any electronic dictionary these days will probably have this. I'm sure interest specific pronunciation guides exist as well (ie: Kansai-ben, etc), but they might be difficult to track down.

I personally think you could probably pick up pitch (without realizing it) if you lived in the culture long enough, but that would take years and isn't necessarily guaranteed. I almost believe that accent is something that only native speakers can pick up on. In talking with Japanese learning English here in Japan, when ever I bring up English accents like Boston, Deep South, Midwestern, etc; most say they hear absolutely no difference between them, and I've heard that from other non-English speakers as well that are from Europe. Incidentally, because of this in ability to hear variation in the way words are said in English, lots of people often have trouble picking up sarcasm.

Anyway, here are some snaps I took of the Accent dictionary that's included with my dictionary to give you an idea on what a Japanese accent dictionary should look like. The lines over the kana represent the pitch. the --] sort of character represents where you move from High pitch to low pitch. I can't remember what the simple straight line over the character meant (too lazy to check), but I think it has something to do with potential for a change based on the following sounds(?). The circle around a シ actually represents where the し in a word is basically not pronounced its more a "sssh" now then a full "shi" according to my teacher.

Hope it helps
-Vix

Approaches to pitch accent? - Jarvik7 - 2010-01-28

Worrying about pitch early in your study will just ensure that you are completely unintelligible as you slowly sound out words while trying to conjure up the pitch scale in your head. Studying pitch later in your study is a waste of time since it's very hard to change your speaking pitch once it's become engrained.

I DO think it's very possible to pick up good pitch unconsciously, but you need to have a good learning environment and people that will correct your pronunciation (without saying "no no that needs to be LLHHHLLHLHHHLL".)

Approaches to pitch accent? - Evil_Dragon - 2010-01-28

One of the monolingual dictionaries on Yahoo Dict. (大辞林) shows pitch accents for most words. Just in case. Wink

I myself believe you can pick up a (fairly) natural sounding accent by immersing yourself and immitating people.

Approaches to pitch accent? - Grinkers - 2010-01-28

I wonder if my Sharp Brain has it... or if I can get it for it. It looks nice, although there's the obvious problem of relying on a dictionary for accents.

Too bad there's no easy way to train accents Sad

Approaches to pitch accent? - Katsuo - 2010-01-28

Most Casio models include the NHK accent dictionary, but only a couple include sound files for it. Details.

Approaches to pitch accent? - vileru - 2010-01-28

The number of words that require a pitch accent aren't exceedingly many. Has anyone tried doing production cards for words that require a pitch accent?

I asked my girlfriend (who's from Sendai, but claims her accent is like that of Tokyo) to pronounce some words that require a pitch accent, including the words the OP mentioned (飼う,買う and 居間, 今), and the difference is audibly noticeable. Therefore, if you can get a sound file of the proper pronunciation, then it shouldn't be a problem to SRS production cards for pitch accent. SRSing pitch accent seems like a more effective way to learn rather than trying to hear and then imitate it whenever you encounter it. However, it's important that a native speaker continually "checks up" on your pronunciation while doing this, otherwise you may end up in a situation where you think you have it right but you actually do not.

Approaches to pitch accent? - Grinkers - 2010-01-28

Katsuo Wrote:Most Casio models include the NHK accent dictionary, but only a couple include sound files for it. Details.

No Sharp! :mad:

I recall seeing a huge selection of books the Dictionaries at Bic Camera. I'll go check it out tomorrow, it looks like a very useful book.

I've never done any updates or extra installations for my dictionary yet... sounds fun! Any other good recommendations (not specifically accent related)?

Approaches to pitch accent? - Grinkers - 2010-01-28

Evil_Dragon Wrote:One of the monolingual dictionaries on Yahoo Dict. (大辞林) shows pitch accents for most words. Just in case.

I myself believe you can pick up a (fairly) natural sounding accent by immersing yourself and immitating people.

I just checked my Sharp Dictionary had it has some arrows too. How do you read the arrows?

Approaches to pitch accent? - Evil_Dragon - 2010-01-28

Grinkers Wrote:I just checked my Sharp Dictionary had it has some arrows too. How do you read the arrows?

I suppose those arrows follow the last syllable that has a high accent (same as here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent#Examples_of_words_which_differ_only_in_pitch).

Approaches to pitch accent? - Tobberoth - 2010-01-28

I seriously doubt anyone is going to get "perfect" pitch accent by SRSing it. Just because you know the pitch in a word doesn't mean you're pronouncing it right, and Anki sure as hell can't detect it.

All you can do is try your best to sound like Japanese people, just like you learn to pronounce any other language. Yeah, it takes years upon years of practice, but there is no shortcut.

Approaches to pitch accent? - vileru - 2010-01-28

Tobberoth Wrote:Just because you know the pitch in a word doesn't mean you're pronouncing it right, and Anki sure as hell can't detect it.

That's why I emphasized the importance of having a native speaker continuously check up on your pronunciation. Of course, the only way you can learn correct pitch accent is by verifying your pronunciation with a native speaker. The purpose of SRSing it is to make sure that you don't forget the pronunciation since most people cannot practice pitch accents on a daily basis with native speakers (and even if they could, they would probably forget to bring up words that they want to practice with pitch accent; SRSing seems to eliminate/diminish this problem).

It doesn't mean that pitch accents cannot be learned in a timely manner simply because it takes most people years to learn them. Most people do not undergo focused study on pitch accents. I'm sure if someone were to attempt to do so, the time required to master a pitch accent would be far less. Voice actors are a prime example of this. Through focused studies on accents, voice actors have been able to master several accents, even subtle ones, in a reasonable amount of time. Take this woman for example. I'm not sure if she can correctly pronounce every word in the dictionary in those accents, but she does a fine job, and I can vouch that her pronunciation of the American accents is impressive (even the slight variation between Seattle/LA accents is dead-on!) . I doubt she studied each of these individual accents for years. A few months of moderate, focused study doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time to approach a native level, or at least a near-native level, accent.

Approaches to pitch accent? - donjorge22 - 2010-01-28

vileru Wrote:
Tobberoth Wrote:Just because you know the pitch in a word doesn't mean you're pronouncing it right, and Anki sure as hell can't detect it.
That's why I emphasized the importance of having a native speaker continuously check up on your pronunciation. Of course, the only way you can learn correct pitch accent is by verifying your pronunciation with a native speaker. The purpose of SRSing it is to make sure that you don't forget the pronunciation since most people cannot practice pitch accents on a daily basis with native speakers (and even if they could, they would probably forget to bring up words that they want to practice with pitch accent; SRSing seems to eliminate/diminish this problem).

It doesn't mean that pitch accents cannot be learned in timely manner simply because it takes most people years to learn them. Most people do not undergo focused study on pitch accents. I'm sure if someone were to attempt to do so, the time required to master a pitch accent would be far less. Voice actors are a prime example of this. Through focused studies on accents, voice actors have been able to master several accents, even subtle ones, in a reasonable amount of time. Take this woman for example. I'm not sure if she can correctly pronounce every word in the dictionary in those accents, but she does a fine job, and I can vouch that her pronunciation of the American accents is impressive (even the slight variation between Seattle/LA accents is dead-on!) . I doubt she studied each of these individual accents for years. A few months of moderate, focused study doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time to approach a native level, or at least a near-native level, accent.

In Anki, just record a native speaker saying a selection of your sentences, then reset their interval to zero and make sure you mimic them perfectly focussing on the pitch accent. Pester native speaker from time to time to check on progress/accuracy/extra comments. There's no reason why pitch accent can't or shouldn't be SRSed.

Approaches to pitch accent? - vix86 - 2010-01-28

Grinkers Wrote:
Katsuo Wrote:Most Casio models include the NHK accent dictionary, but only a couple include sound files for it. Details.
No Sharp! :mad:

I recall seeing a huge selection of books the Dictionaries at Bic Camera. I'll go check it out tomorrow, it looks like a very useful book.

I've never done any updates or extra installations for my dictionary yet... sounds fun! Any other good recommendations (not specifically accent related)?

Without knowing which Sharp dictionary you have exactly so I can check what it does have I can't suggest too much. Though, I suspect your dictionary probably has everything that mine has that I find useful. ie: 広辞苑 & 明鏡国語辞書, the 新漢語林 for 漢字辞書 (complete with stroke order lookup, etymology, etc.), basic 英和・和英辞書、a good 英英辞書 is good to have too sometimes especially for the pesky words sometimes used in the 和英. I find the 和英 (プログレッシブ和英中辞典）tends to have British English slant so as an American English user I'm sometimes caught off guard by some of the definitions.

Actually I'm sitting here looking through some of the dictionaries not on hotkeys on mine and I have a dictionary here called 「みんなで国語辞書!」 its basically a slang dictionary for Japanese. Its broken into sections: 若いの言葉、ネット・メールの言葉、オノマトペの言葉、言葉さまざま作品集、学校の言葉、業界・専門用語、日常の言葉・通の言葉、方言メモ。 I actually never realized I had this, this thing is actually pretty interesting, but I see it lacks some stuff.

What you need or could use will obviously depend upon everyday need and Japanese level. If you don't have a good dictionary for 敬語 you might look into seeing if they have that as well. My dictionary has 「敬語早わかり辞典学研」 but I haven't got a clue how to use it to be honest (its menu driven and category based, not keyword lookup).

-Vix

Approaches to pitch accent? - nest0r - 2010-01-28

Pitch accents are easy to pick up, that's reason #142345345 that I stress having audio for SRS cards.

Approaches to pitch accent? - donjorge22 - 2010-01-28

nest0r Wrote:Pitch accents are easy to pick up, that's reason #142345345 that I stress having audio for SRS cards.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. But certainly not for all cards. You need some production cards too.

Approaches to pitch accent? - nest0r - 2010-01-28

donjorge22 Wrote:
nest0r Wrote:Pitch accents are easy to pick up, that's reason #142345345 that I stress having audio for SRS cards.
Yes, yes, yes and yes.

We share common ground! ;p

Edit:

donjorge22 Wrote:But certainly not for all cards. You need some production cards too.

Oh we lost it. Nope, I don't find production cards necessary at all. Listen closely, mimic, and I have zero problems with pitch. The key is the overall audio sentence context, relative intervals and prosody and all that good stuff.

Approaches to pitch accent? - donjorge22 - 2010-01-28

nest0r Wrote:
donjorge22 Wrote:
nest0r Wrote:Pitch accents are easy to pick up, that's reason #142345345 that I stress having audio for SRS cards.
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
We share common ground! ;p

Edit:
donjorge22 Wrote:But certainly not for all cards. You need some production cards too.
Oh we lost it. Nope, I don't find production cards necessary at all. Listen closely, mimic, and I have zero problems with pitch. The key is the overall audio sentence context, relative intervals and prosody and all that good stuff.

Haha, I know there are other people on here who don't like audio cards at all :p

But I find that it's hard to recall words later (i.e. in real life) if not for a certain number of production cards. They don't have to be for everything, but if nothing else it keeps SRSing more interesting.