One thing that's pissed me off for a long time now is that it seems nobody cares about pitch accent in Japanese. (Before anybody gets confused: the word "accent" in "pitch accent" has nothing to do with the sense of the word as in "Texan accent". It has to do with which syllables have high or low pitch; see here.) Most learning materials don't teach it. Many dictionaries(!) don't have it. And it's difficult to come across information about it on the 'net. I've found some pages that discuss it, but few that really go beyond simple examples like the age-old HA-shi ga, ha-SHI ga, ha-SHI GA stuff. What about suffixes? Those change the pronunciation sometimes, but I've found next to nothing in English that discusses this.

I've heard that pitch accent isn't very important, but I'm convinced that this is bull. Without proper pitch accent, you will not sound like a native speaker and it will make it harder to be understood correctly, because pitch accent is part of how the Japanese ear tells words apart, just like stress in English.

I've also heard many times that you should pick up pitch accent by ear. I think this is also bull. For one thing, pitch in vocabulary is lexical: it's part of the word. The only way to know the pitch of a word is to either look it up or wait for somebody to say it (and that somebody has to speak Standard Japanese and not, say, Kansai-ben). I don't know about you, but I'm not very patient about waiting around to hear a word half a dozen times before its pronunciation sticks. The correct pronunciation should be learned with the word, because it's a part of the word.

Another thing is that it's complicated. For example, 漢字 is pronounced ka-N-JI ("flat" accent), but 常用漢字 is pronounced "jo-O-YO-O-KA-n-ji" -- the pitch of 漢字 is reversed when it's at the end of a compound word!

I bought Japanese for Everyone partly because it marks pitch accent, but, alas, it discusses it much less extensively than I thought. I'm on lesson one and I'm already confused. The very first sentence is:

パスポートを　みせてください。

The problem is with みせて (見せて). The book gives the pitch accent only for the -te form, and both the book and the audio recording pronounce it MI-se-te. But the dictionary form of the verb, according to dictionary.goo.ne.jp and the NHK Akusento Jiten, is mi-SE-ru. Why's it different? I don't know, and I definitely don't know enough Japanese to read an explanation in Japanese about it. (If I did, I wouldn't need Japanese for Everyone. )

Anybody have any resources, any tips, anything?

- Kef

Older materials seem to focus on pitch accent a lot more than modern materials. I've got a copy of Beginning Japanese, which is an inscrutable relic from the sixties based entirely around drilling Japanese into your head in the most inanely boring way conceivable. It does, however, mark the pitch accent of every single sentence, and the author likes to indulge in technical monologues about how the pitch accent of a word can change depending on the word's ending, what words come before or after it, and whether or not it's at the beginning or end of a sentence.

Of course, it's all romaji, it's meant to be used with tapes that are both ridiculously expensive and hard to find, and the vocabulary is... limited, to say the least. Still, with language learning materials, the older they are the more information they tend to have. The information tends to be wrapped up with dreadfully boring content and methods, but it's there.

Pitch accent sucks. :/ Most people will understand you, but you definitely get some "... OH, yonde, i thought you mean yoNDE" experiences. In a class I was taking last semester we went over the system of how accentation works, I dont know if you've read much on the systematic way of figuring it out, but our class notes seem to still be online, if you want to take a look:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fljpm/FLJ302/302-0...accent.pdf

While I went over it, I cant say how useful it is to me because I cant particularly sit and think about all the accentation rules while im forming sentences. I have enough to worry about trying to pull out the right vocab and piece my particles together. Not to mention a lot of things you just simply have to know the accent of when you learn the word.

If you want a good reference though, I think that pdf is a nice start.

Indeed so, the lack of information about that is irritating. It is also one of biggest points that distingusihes various dialects. People always give the basic example of ha-shi being different ways round in Tokyo and Osaka but it spans out to all vocabulary. Chinese people are very good at picking this up bacuse they have a good ear for that but for English speakers it is very tough. If you speak in Tokyo pitch accent and then throw in some kansai vocabulary is sounds ridiculous.

Also, the big mistake that many textbooks make is by expalaining pitches by saying they are sylabel stress, which is completely incorrect. This leads the English speaker to put extra volume on some sylabels, which makes your Japanese sound like English. The high and low pitch should in no way alter the level of volume in each pitch.

This can be just like a regional accent, and should be picked up as one. By imitating it and being surrounded by it. The stresses changed in different regions of Japan, you know. Which explains 見せて.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

This is not the type of thing to be impatient about. The best way would be to put the audio with your sentence/vocab in anki and listen/imitate. Just imitate. Listen to the news a lot, they're supposed to have perfect pitch accent.

EDIT: Textbooks? Learning an accent from textbooks? I can tell you right now that's not going to work. I believe Khatzumoto did not have any trouble with pitch accent. Just listen and imitate.

walexander5 Wrote:Pitch accent sucks. :/ Most people will understand you, but you definitely get some "... OH, yonde, i thought you mean yoNDE" experiences. In a class I was taking last semester we went over the system of how accentation works, I dont know if you've read much on the systematic way of figuring it out, but our class notes seem to still be online, if you want to take a look:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fljpm/FLJ302/302-0...accent.pdf

Ahh, yes, this explains it. Thanks.

alyks Wrote:This can be just like a regional accent, and should be picked up as one. By imitating it and being surrounded by it. The stresses changed in different regions of Japan, you know. Which explains 見せて.

Pretty much all textbooks teach Tokyo-ben unless they're specifically designed to teach another dialect (probably Kansai-ben, and such books aren't written for beginners). Certainly any book teaching pitch accent will use Tokyo-ben accent.

- Kef

My advice would be to just watch lots
of Japanese TV. After a while, you'll just start imitate their accents
without noticing.

My favorite thing to do is to think of a drama scene
that matches my current situation. Then I'll try
to act like I'm one of the characters and imitate their
pitch and words/phrases.

It works surprisingly well.

For TV Shows

Dramas:
http://www.d-addicts.com
http://www.mysoju.com

TV:
TVUplayer
Keyhole TV

Good luck.

chamcham Wrote:My advice would be to just watch lots
of Japanese TV. After a while, you'll just start imitate their accents
without noticing.

I already addressed that argument in my original post...

Perhaps you could learn through audio books or something. You'll be practicing reading, listening, grammar and vocab, so why not pitch accent too? Mimic the voices or something.

I'm not worried about pitch accent myself because my goal is reading and listening comprehension. Not speaking, and not speaking with a native accent(it would be nice, but there's no use for it here...)

furrykef Wrote:Many dictionaries(!) don't have it. And it's difficult to come across information about it on the 'net.

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp

Quote:I've found some pages that discuss it, but few that really go beyond simple examples like the age-old HA-shi ga, ha-SHI ga, ha-SHI GA stuff. What about suffixes? Those change the pronunciation sometimes, but I've found next to nothing in English that discusses this.

There are no strict rules governing how particles and suffixes figure in to accents. It's on a case-by-case basis. That's why there are no definitive guides on the subject.

Quote:Without proper pitch accent, you will not sound like a native speaker and it will make it harder to be understood correctly, because pitch accent is part of how the Japanese ear tells words apart, just like stress in English.

The only way to sound like a native speaker is to imitate a native speaker. A book won't help much.

Quote:I've also heard many times that you should pick up pitch accent by ear.

You should.

Quote:I'm not very patient about waiting around to hear a word half a dozen times before its pronunciation sticks.

So ask someone to pronounce it for you if you're unsure about how it sounds.

Quote:Another thing is that it's complicated. For example, 漢字 is pronounced ka-N-JI ("flat" accent), but 常用漢字 is pronounced "jo-O-YO-O-KA-n-ji" -- the pitch of 漢字 is reversed when it's at the end of a compound word!

So? A lot of things are complicated. What good is complaining about it going to do?

Quote:The problem is with みせて (見せて). The book gives the pitch accent only for the -te form, and both the book and the audio recording pronounce it MI-se-te.

I can't say I've ever heard 見せてprounounced as MI-se-te. I would expect mi-SE-TE. Are you sure you're hearing the accent correctly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent Wrote:About 80% of all Japanese words belong to this class, and the Japanese describe their sound as "flat" (平板 heiban) or "accentless".

Here's one reason why accent isn't given too much attention. 4/5 of the words in the language follow the same accent pattern, so if you stick with that for words you don't know, there's only a 20% chance that you'll be wrong.

If you're desperate to learn proper Tokyo-ben pitch accent, grab the NHK accent dictionary. There *was* a version on CD-Rom that came out in 2002 that had ~67,000 words pronounced by NHK announcers. (They even do the formal weird-sounding ng sound for がーぎーぐーげーご.) It only works on EPWING readers, and the only place I found it was on Share, after much searching. I tried very hard, and could not find a way to actually BUY it. Apparently it wasn't very popular, because the sound files ate up a lot of disk space and resources.

But it's a useful resource when you're trying to learn how to differentiate between 橋　and はし.

And yeah, when I was at Yamasa, I was constantly getting my pitch accent corrected. I think the best way to learn proper pitch accent is just by immersing yourself in Japanese.

Wow, this is a looong post. (I can't help it... people kept responding while I was writing it!)

yukamina Wrote:Perhaps you could learn through audio books or something. You'll be practicing reading, listening, grammar and vocab, so why not pitch accent too? Mimic the voices or something.

Actually, I do intend to do just that. I just don't think practice alone is enough... pitch accent does follow some rules and I think it really helps to know what they are.

Quote:I'm not worried about pitch accent myself because my goal is reading and listening comprehension. Not speaking, and not speaking with a native accent(it would be nice, but there's no use for it here...)

The problem with such a goal is that, if you change your mind, you've got quite a hill to climb. Imagine if I learned 10,000 words and only then decided to learn pitch accent. Then I'd suddenly have 10,000 words to learn accents for!

JimmySeal Wrote:

furrykef Wrote:Many dictionaries(!) don't have it. And it's difficult to come across information about it on the 'net.

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp

Yes, I was aware of that link, and I should have posted it myself. It still can't answer all my questions, though.

Quote:There are no strict rules governing how particles and suffixes figure in to accents. It's on a case-by-case basis. That's why there are no definitive guides on the subject.

Well, that PDF that walexander5 pointed me to seems to have a few such rules. It's not a complete guide, but it gives me a much better idea of how the system works as a whole.

Quote:The only way to sound like a native speaker is to imitate a native speaker. A book won't help much.

I agree and disagree. Where I agree is that the phonological side of things can only be done by imitation. No book can tell you how to make the sounds; . The lexical side of things is another story. A book cannot tell you what the rises and drops in pitch actually sound like, but it can tell you where they go, which can be useful if you already know what those rises and drops sound like. It's not really any different from marking stress in English.

Of course, a book can't tell you everything, and there comes a point where you have no choice but to "wing it" the same way native speakers do. But I think to do it properly you need to have a solid foundation.

Quote:

Quote:I've also heard many times that you should pick up pitch accent by ear.

You should.

Allow me to clarify: I've heard that I should do it solely by ear. I think that's a silly proposition.

Quote:

Quote:Another thing is that it's complicated. For example, 漢字 is pronounced ka-N-JI ("flat" accent), but 常用漢字 is pronounced "jo-O-YO-O-KA-n-ji" -- the pitch of 漢字 is reversed when it's at the end of a compound word!

So? A lot of things are complicated. What good is complaining about it going to do?

Well, complaining is cathartic. But seriously, the point I was making is that doing it by ear alone makes things more complicated than necessary, explaining why I do not like the "do it by ear" approach. I do not think the difference in accent between 漢字 and 常用漢字 would easily be noticed without it having been pointed out.

Quote:I can't say I've ever heard 見せてprounounced as MI-se-te. I would expect mi-SE-TE. Are you sure you're hearing the accent correctly?

Considering that the book says it's pronounced that way, my ear is hearing it that way, and the PDF says it's pronounced that way, I think we can be pretty sure that it's pronounced that way -- in Tokyo-ben, of course. Other dialects may (and will) vary.

rich_f Wrote:If you're desperate to learn proper Tokyo-ben pitch accent, grab the NHK accent dictionary. There *was* a version on CD-Rom that came out in 2002 that had ~67,000 words pronounced by NHK announcers. (They even do the formal weird-sounding ng sound for がーぎーぐーげーご.) It only works on EPWING readers, and the only place I found it was on Share, after much searching. I tried very hard, and could not find a way to actually BUY it. Apparently it wasn't very popular, because the sound files ate up a lot of disk space and resources.

I actually have the NHK Akusento Jiten, in both the paper and CD-ROM versions. (I don't have the CD-ROM version legally, mind, since it's been out of print, but no matter... the thing doesn't run very well anyways.) It does help with some things, but it also goes into a lot of detail that I can't understand because, well, I don't speak Japanese.

- Kef

Furrykef,
The best examples of tone I've seen are in the text Beginning Japanese. As Mcjon01 says, it is a relic from the 60s, but the tapes are spoken at natural speed and sentences are drilled into your head with repetition. I've found them to be the only tapes I've been able to listen to, since they don't hop between English and Japanese, and the pitch can be followed easily in the text. Once you get used to hearing the sentences at this speed on the tapes, you can't miss them in movies/anime, etc. and you'll never complain that people talk too fast. Sample some of the last lessons in the tape first to see where it will take you. The downside is the occasion old word, and the text is all romaji - however, you'll spend most of your time listening to the tapes, not reading the text, so it's effective. I found a copy in my library - for free.

timcampbell Wrote:The downside is the occasion old word, and the text is all romaji - however, you'll spend most of your time listening to the tapes, not reading the text, so it's effective.

Wait, so you're telling me that I'm not going to be able to work 「ソビエト」 into everyday conversation?

Asking for rules on pitch accent is like asking for rules for a New York accent.

"I do not think the difference in accent between 漢字 and 常用漢字 would easily be noticed without it having been pointed out."

Wrong wrong wrong. If you're looking for variations in pitch in words, then you will notice. If you're aware there are differences and you try and listen for them, then there should be no problem. Listen and imitate. It's the same as learning Chinese, which Farber's book has an excellent description on.

walexander5 Wrote:In a class I was taking last semester we went over the system of how accentation works, I dont know if you've read much on the systematic way of figuring it out, but our class notes seem to still be online, if you want to take a look:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fljpm/FLJ302/302-0...accent.pdf

Here's another version that I made based on his old video series, before he had handouts for it:

http://scoutsghost.googlepages.com/Mertz...ecture.pdf

PS: I knew other people from NCSU had to be around here! If you're around Raleigh, are you going to 夏祭り? It starts it under two hours. See http://trianglejapanclub.org/natsumatsuri_2008_jp.pdf or http://trianglejapanclub.org/natsumatsuri_2008_en.pdf for details.

Yo, how about adopting a "parent" for your japanese studies?
Pick a certain actor and try to imitate him. A very cool one.

I did it for my english. I've chosen both Jack Sparrow (the pirate) and Hansi Kirch (from blind guardian). I figured out if I were to sound non-native for life, at least I would sound cool.

furrykef Wrote:Allow me to clarify: I've heard that I should do it solely by ear. I think that's a silly proposition.

I would be amazed if anyone could actually learn it any other way. I bought an accent dictionary a while ago and then I realized that most J-J dictionaries have a number code that indicates the accent on words but I've really never used either. I just can't look at the accent for a word and make it stick. On the other hand, it is actually pretty easy to pick up by ear; if you keep hearing a word you will naturally learn the accent. Also you will probably pick up the general rules without really thinking about it. I didn't learn about pitch in Japanese classes at all for a long time, and when I did I was pretty angry, perhaps because this was when I first realized that hiragana didn't actually contain all the phonetic information of Japanese. However, Japanese pitch accent isn't really any worse than most types of regional accents that different language has. Anecdotally, it seems that if pitch accent is the only thing strange about your Japanese, people will just assume you're from a different region. I can't imagine telling someone learning English that they should study a particular regional accent carefully, and similarly I think there's no reason to get stressed about Japanese pitch accent.

Pitch accent is important, and shouldn't be quickly dismissed. It's a part of the Japanese language as much as which syllable to stress is a part of English. You will either not be understood, or be understood but force people to listen to a very bad accent. While it is very unlikely for any of us here to speak Japanese exactly like a native, that doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for it and at least reach a level where the accent doesn't get in the way of communication. We can all think of people who speak English with a slight foreign accent but there's they're very capable and there's never a problem understanding them, as well as other speakers who you have to ask what they've said every fifth sentence (until you get tired of asking). Which would you rather be in Japanese?

@ Mcjon01
Yeah, ソビエト is one of those words. However, any text has some words I will likely never use, so to me it's not a big problem, considered in context. I think I'm one of the rare people on this site who is a fan of the FSI system. It's great for immersion, IMO. Of course, it's not a substitute for movies, manga or talking with japanese, but its a good additive.

What is FSI system?

Oh, I know, and I'm not knocking FSI-style materials. I'm actually fond of them, in a love-hate sort of way. They definitely work, but with the way I learn, I see them more as an ideal resource in the intermediate stage for sharpening and drilling specific trouble-areas, after working through the basic stage to get a more global view of the language.

mentat_kgs Wrote:What is FSI system?

Step 1: Memorize a set of dialogs by heart.
Step 2: Do a series of drills to acclimate yourself to manipulating the language in various ways. Do these drills until answers are literally instantaneous with no thought.
Step 3: Repeat. Hundreds, upon hundreds of times.

It's fun! Really!

Ah, I tried that for french and it made me quit the language.

I cannot even come close to helping here. However, I do karaoke alot and can do about 8 songs in Japanese (not from memory, I have to read in kanji no less). Besides showing I need to work on my vocabulary, I think it helps me distinguish pitch even in normal dialogues. I try to match what I hear. Then again, I think I have a good aural ability. Just have a script out of a TV scene, play the scene with audio down and try to match the scene.

The text to speech change up suggested by AJATT has also helped.

Perhaps a tape like Pimsleur would be good for you (if its not too slow). I really like how it stresses pronunciation without going into minutia about it.